Practical rock engineering / Практическая разработка горных пород

We tend to think of rock engineering as a modern discipline and yet, as early as 1773, Coulomb included results of tests on rocks from Bordeaux in a paper read before the French Academy in Paris (Coulomb, 1776, Heyman, 1972). French engineers started construction of the Panama Canal in 1884 and this task was taken over by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1908. In the half century between 1910 and 1964, 60 slides were recorded in cuts along the canal and, although these slides were not analysed in rock mechanics terms, recent work by the US Corps of Engineers (Lutton et al, 1979) shows that these slides were predominantly controlled by structural discontinuities and that modern rock mechanics concepts are fully applicable to the analysis of these failures. In discussing the Panama Canal slides in his Presidential Address to the first international conference on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering in 1936, Karl Terzaghi (Terzaghi, 1936, Terzaghi and Voight, 1979) said ‘The catastrophic descent of the slopes of the deepest cut of the Panama Canal issued a warning that we were overstepping the limits of our ability to predict the consequences of our actions ....’. <...>