Citation by Abdul Shakoor

The paper entitled “Landslide Stability: Role of Rainfall-Induced, Laterally Propagating, Pore-Pressure Waves,” co-authored by George Priest, William Schulz, William Ellis, Jonathan Allan, Alan Niem, and Wendy Niem, was first published in Volume 17, Issue 4, November, 2011, of Environmental and Engineering Geoscience, a joint publication of AEG and GSA.

George Priest and Jonathan Allan are from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, William Schulz, and William Ellis are from the U.S.G.S., Alan Niem is Professor Emeritus Oregon State University and Wendy Niem is from Pacific Northwest Geology, LLC.

During the review process, all three reviewers ranked this paper as very good and provided a series of comments to further improve the quality of the paper. The authors showed extreme diligence to address the reviewers’ comments. Once published, both co-Editors of Environmental and Engineering Geoscience selected it to receive the 2012 AEG Publication award, given to the best paper among the four issues published in the previous year.

It is no surprise that this paper has been selected, again, for the GSA-EGD Burwell award. From all angles, this is an outstanding and well-researched publication, meeting the criteria of scientific content making a new contribution to the existing knowledge, detailed data analysis, excellent quality of illustrations, and current references.

It is my pleasure to introduce the authors of this outstanding publication and the recipients of the 2015 Burwell Award.

2015 E.B. Burwell, Jr., Award — Response by George R. Priest

We thank Dr. Abdul Shakoor for his kind words and are deeply grateful for recognition by AEG and GSA of our work on the paper entitled “Landslide Stability: Role of Rainfall-Induced, Laterally Propagating, Pore-Pressure Waves,” published 2011 in Environmental and Engineering Geoscience. We are honored to receive the 2015 E.B. Burwell, Jr. Award and hope that the award will spur more multi-year monitoring studies of well instrumented landslides.

The paper is in every sense the product of a collaboration begun by Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries and Oregon Department of Transportation but joined half way through the 5-year study by invaluable expertise and instrumentation from USGS. The project demonstrated the extremely slow speed of vertical infiltration during rainfall events in contrast to the rapid lateral transmission of the rise in pore pressure when this infiltration first reaches the water table. The findings underline the importance to remediation of dewatering the parts of landslides with the shallowest water tables. An ancillary finding was the apparent superior pore pressure data resulting from piezometers installed in grout relative to those installed in traditional sand packs. We hope that these findings will help the geotechnical community to more efficiently slow or stop movement on large bedrock landslides driven chiefly by hydraulic forces.

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