Protection measure management and rockface monitoring
Tempi Valley, Greece
39° 48′ N, 22° 29′ E
2009 - today
The 7-km-long Tempi gorge directly south of Mount Olympus has always been a bottleneck in the important traffic link between northern and southern Greece, and between the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Since the completion of the corresponding section of motorway in 2017, the gorge has been bypassed by three tunnels. Previously, over 20,000 vehicles passed through the gorge between Thessaloniki and Athens each day.
After the rockfall of December 2009, in which the chief engineer of the motorway construction site tragically died, GEOTEST investigated the causes of the event within the scope of technical expertise.
Every six months, GEOTEST employees work with local mountaineers to monitor the protective structures and impressive marble rock towers.
GEOTEST’s geologists worked out a concept on site for immediate measures to secure and restore the crash site. This enabled the buried road to be cleared and the overall securing of the gorge to be initiated.
To this day, twice each year a team of GEOTEST geologists and local alpinists inspect the up to 300-metre-tall marble rock towers and the extensive protective structures built to secure the road. In this way, dangers can be detected at an early stage and measures to protect road users can be taken promptly.
Client
Publications on the project
Monitoring of Tempi Valley Critical Rock Masses
Establishment of Special Monitoring Network and Procedures in Aegean Motorway S.A. Concession Project.
Kostas Kalogirou, Efstratios Iliaskos (Aegean Motorway S.A.).
4th Joint International Symposium on Deformation Monitoring (JISDM), 15-17 May 2019, Athens, Greece.
Rock Avalanche Investigation in Tempi Valley, Greece
Graf K., Rathayr B., Raemy V. (2015), G. Lollino et al. (eds.).
Engineering Geology for Society and Territory – Volume 2, DOI.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
