Results of geophysical site investigations near a destroyed building in El-Sahab sector, Suez government, Egypt

In a morning of one day we listened from the radio news and we read in the formal newspapers that a serious tilting of a five-floor building in El-Sahab sector has ocuured and the local authorities have moved the building’s:esidents to another place. The first visit to the site proved that a tilting of about 30 degrees from the vertical has:iappened to the concerned building. A geophysical plane, including vertical ele - trical soundings and self potential profiling, has been proposed to study the site characterization in order to delineate the causes of the building subsidence and tilting. Interpretation of the obtained field measurements indicated that the destroyed building, and all the other buildings of the El-Sahab sector, have been built along and across an old buried channel of Gebel Ataqa drainage system. Moreover, a subsurface lens of highly swelling claystone has been detected below one side of the destroyed. A few months later, most of the other buildings in the El-Sahab sector have suffered the same cοndition which pushed the local authorities to move all the residents to a safe place. This study strongly recommended that an intensive site investigation must be carried out before the final decision of constructing a new urban area or any large projects.