The SAFER Borehole Database (SAFER/GEO-591 v1.1) User Manual by C.E.L. Gilder, R.M. Pokhrel & P.J. Vardanega Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol December 2019 (version 1.1) Suggested citation: Gilder, C. E. L., Pokhrel, R. M., Vardanega, P. J. (2019). The SAFER Borehole Database (SAFER/GEO-591_v1.1): User Manual, December 2019, v1.1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. https://doi.org/10.5523/bris.3gjcvx51lnpuv269xsa1yrb0rw Disclaimer: The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the study sponsor(s), project partner(s), data contributor(s) or the University of Bristol. This report and accompanying database do not constitute a design standard or code of practice. This report is for information purposes only and should not be relied upon for any specific purpose. Released under the CC-BY 4.0 Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) The SAFER Borehole Database (SAFER/GEO-591) User Manual by C.E.L. Gilder, R.M. Pokhrel & P.J. Vardanega Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol December 2019 (version 1.1) Document revisions: This document supersedes manual 1.0. Gilder, C. E. L., Pokhrel, R. M., Vardanega, P. J. (2019). The SAFER Borehole Database (SAFER/GEO-591): User Manual, September 2019, v1.0. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. https://doi.org/10.5523/bris.2d5fji307ihtm28492er663bwf The SAFER Borehole Database – User Manual SAFER/GEO-591 v1.1 Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank and acknowledge the support received throughout the project. The authors acknowledge the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) project “Seismic Safety and Resilience of Schools in Nepal” SAFER (EP/P028926/1). The first author acknowledges the support of EPSRC (EP/R51245X/1). The authors wish to thank the many contributors who have assisted with making the project possible. In particular: • We are grateful to Dr Flavia De Luca, Dr Raffaele De Risi and Dr Maximilian Werner for their valuable contribution. • We are grateful to Professor Prem Nath Maskey for providing supporting documents as well as his continuing valuable support throughout the project. • The authors would like to thank NSET-Nepal, including Surya Shrestha and particularly Narayan Marasini for providing reports and supporting documents which were used in this work and without their invaluable contribution the project would not be possible. • The authors are also particularly thankful to Professor Dominiki Asimaki from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Rishi Parajuli from the University of Bristol, also Surendra Shrestha and Satyam Poudel from Earth Investigation and Solution Nepal Pvt. Ltd for providing contribution to data collection. Finally, we are grateful to Professor Anastasios Sextos, the principal investigator, for his leadership of the SAFER project. University of Bristol December 2019 i The SAFER Borehole Database – User Manual SAFER/GEO-591 v1.1 Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 2 DATABASE BUILDING ............................................................................................................... 2 2.1 Data sources ............................................................................................................................ 2 2.2 Database structure ................................................................................................................... 2 2.2.1 Overview ......................................................................................................................... 2 2.3 Database tables ........................................................................................................................ 3 2.3.1 Location details ............................................................................................................... 3 2.3.2 Geology ........................................................................................................................... 4 2.3.3 Groundwater ................................................................................................................... 7 2.3.4 Standard Penetration Testing (SPT) ................................................................................ 7 2.3.5 Velocity data ................................................................................................................... 8 2.3.6 Shear wave velocity in the first 30 m (VS30) .................................................................... 9 2.3.7 Geotechnical Laboratory Testing .................................................................................. 11 2.4 Database quality designation ................................................................................................ 15 3 DATABASE STATISTICS .......................................................................................................... 16 4 SUMMARY .................................................................................................................................. 22 5 REPORT REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 23 Appendix I: SAFER Database Sources ................................................................................................. 24 Appendix II: List of resources .............................................................................................................. 35 Appendix III: Geology codes ................................................................................................................ 36 Appendix IV: Database Overview ........................................................................................................ 38 University of Bristol December 2019 ii The SAFER Borehole Database – User Manual SAFER/GEO-591 v1.1 1 INTRODUCTION The SAFER Borehole Database (SAFER/GEO-591_1.1) has been developed as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project EP/P028926/1: Seismic Safety and Resilience of Schools in Nepal (SAFER). The database is populated with data digitised from the literature, published reports and datasets supplied by contributors from the geotechnical engineering industry in Nepal and research papers. The database file structure is based on the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering Specialists (AGS) data format (AGS, 2017). The database describes 529 borehole logs distributed throughout the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal including data at 591 different locations including ground conditions, groundwater levels, in situ tests and geotechnical laboratory testing. The boreholes were collected from sources either originally pursued for research purposes or conducted during commercial geotechnical investigations. This report outlines the database structure, methodology and details of the meta-data available in the database. The Kathmandu Valley in Nepal is an earthquake prone region which has been subject to reoccurring high magnitude earthquakes, in recent years particularly the Gorkha 2015 event (e.g. Goda et al. 2015). The purpose of the database collection was to present a unified database of ground information and shear-wave velocity (Vs) measurements to inform any future research undertaken in site response analysis. The database has been uploaded to the data.bris Research Data Repository at the University of Bristol, and has been released online for use by the community under the CC-BY 4.0 Licence. University of Bristol December 2019 1 The SAFER Borehole Database – User Manual SAFER/GEO-591 v1.1 2 DATABASE BUILDING 2.1 Data sources The SAFER database includes data from literature, industry and reports. All sources have been referenced in Appendix I. The data included in the database has been allocated a unique identifier (ID) which reflects its source type, the organisation name or authors of the data, the year the data was obtained and a borehole ID number (commonly reflecting the borehole numbers provided in the original source data). Some examples are provided in Table 1 below. Table 1 - Examples of unique identifiers Organisation/ Type (1) Year BH No. Unique Identifier author/location R JICA 1990 B1 R_JICA_1990_B1 RES Pagl 2018 BH1 RES_Pagl_2018_BH1 IND Baba 2008 BH1 IND_Baba_2008_BH1 (1) Type (where R = report; IND = industrial; RES = research such as journal/conference paper) Those from consultancy sources (of type IND) were assigned a four-letter code which represents the first four letters of a location in the Kathmandu Valley instead of an organisation name to maintain anonymity e.g. Bhak would represent industry data available from Bhaktapur. Where the source is from a research article the first four letters of the first author is taken and a similar method is taken for organisation reports. Where year is unknown this has been specified as 1000 or similar. In other categories unknowns have been represented by Unkn. 2.2 Database structure 2.2.1 Overview The database consists of one main spreadsheet named SAFER/GEO-591 (SAFER-GEO-591_v1.1.xlsx). This spreadsheet contains a series of internal tables or ‘tabs’ which have also been provided as separate .csv files (e.g. LOCA.csv). These tables in the spreadsheet have been named in the same way that is specified in the AGS data format for borehole records (AGS, 2017) and are set as four-letter group