Abstract
In the design practice of retaining walls for road embankment, in particular for stacked block type retaining walls which have been widely used in Japan, any eartuquake effects have not been taken into account. However, the heavy damages to mountain roads caused by Niigataken-chuetsu EQ clearly indicated nessesity to secure aseismisity of such retaining walls. In this study, the failure mechanism was studied through invesitigation of the damaged and undamaged walls. A simple method to evaluate failure potential of existing retaining walls, in which cone penetration test and bearing capacity calculation are incorpotated, are proposed.
