Aldo Behrens, Oliver Brubacher, Karan Perhar and Hunter Straughan
- Community Partner: BGC Engineering, AM2 Geotechnical Inc., and the City of Whitehorse
- Degree: Bachelor of Applied Science
- Program:
- Campus: Vancouver
Our project
There have been an increasing number of landslides on the escarpment along a stretch of Robert Service Way in the City of Whitehorse. A large landslide in 2022 closed the road, and another a month later closed access for several weeks. Robert Service Way is one of only two roadways into the city’s downtown core, making it a critical transportation corridor, and the adjacent Millennium Trail is a popular walking route.
We were asked to quantify the landslide life-loss risk for users of Robert Service Way and the Millennium Trail along a 550-metre stretch of the road and to propose recommendations to mitigate risk.
The challenges we faced
When we started this work in September, we had minimal knowledge of what was involved in a quantitative risk assessment – it was not until second semester that we covered this type of assessment in one of our courses.
That meant that we had to teach ourselves how to do this kind of analysis. In fact, for the first two weeks, we were performing the wrong kind of assessment altogether.
Another challenge was collecting and integrating many different applicable data sources and aligning the data in ways that made sense.
What we’re most proud of
Unlike other projects, this was an extremely open-ended capstone project that gave us the freedom to come up with any number of solutions. It’s been meaningful to work on a real-world engineering challenge and propose a solution that could potentially save lives.
Additionally, it was satisfying to produce a comprehensive engineering technical report before we head out into the working world. It’s meant a lot to have gained this experience of being part of a team and knowing that we are more than capable of working on these kinds of challenges.
