HYDRAULIC EVALUATION OF NILE BANKS STABILITY USING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

The stability of banks has a major economical, environmental and social influence on the people living along the river. The choice of potential locations for riverside projects requires accurate assessment of river bank stability. The banks stability in turn comprises many hydraulic, spatial and temporal parameters, varying continuously, which enhances the need of a system capable to store, manipulate, analyze and update diverse data easily and efficiently; A Geographical Information system (GIS) is a powerful versatile tool customized in this study that enables the simultaneous consideration of many factors and parameters through its full power of managing spatial and attributes data in a comprehensive database for subsequent manipulation and analysis. The main goal of this study is to develop an engineering code combining the storage power of GIS to the analysis power of slope stability program to offer a reliable tool for judging the stability of banks based on their geometric, hydraulic and geotechnical properties in an integrated geographical framework.

In order to achieve this goal a study methodology was designed including these following procedures: i) Assignment of the main variables contributed to banks stability. ii) selection of a slope stability program and a GIS software to be compiled together. iii) The design of GIS database structure. iv) The development of engineering code capable to retrieve the stored data in GIS to be analyzed by the slope stability program and to present the resul�s of analysis in a layout that relates the

information and results to their spatial location along the river bank.

Finally, a pilot area was chosen in Qena governorate to validate the proposed methodology by applying the developed code to the actual conditions of the banks in the selected reach to evaluate the safety factor of the stability of banks. Furthermore, an estimate was made for the qualification of manpower and the time required to apply the new methodology to the reach from Aswan to the Delta barrage. This estimate clarifies the enormous saving of effort and time gained by using the developed system.