Designing Roads and Retaining Structures for Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan

摘要

Since 2002, coalition forces have focused on efforts to reconstruct and create new infrastructure in Afghanistan to help stabilize the nation and improve trade and opportunities for a livelihood. The U.S. projects in Afghanistan used common American construction standards. Applying these standards to the projects appeared reasonable, but, in actual practice, these standards have been difficult to implement owing to limited access to technical information, lack of information about local terrain and environment, and limited understanding of local social customs. Afghanistan lacks skilled labor capable of performing quality work. In addition, there are few Afghan testing laboratories for conducting quality control. The quality of available construction materials is unreliable. Logistics are complicated because of the poor state of the transportation infrastructure, and there are no local systems necessary to sustain procurement efforts for major infrastructure projects. Even if a trained engineer is available and willing to work from a set of standards, the information needed to apply the standards may not be available and testing facilities to measure necessary parameters are lacking. This report aims to overcome the lack of availability of actual data for Nangarhar Province. A rational range of values for parameters used in designing and building infrastructure is presented in this report from available geological information and climatic data. The geological data were used to obtain local soil classification and other relevant engineering information. Nangarhar Province was selected as a test case to gather together a pertinent set of design information and useful data with the idea that the process used to generate this report could be replicated for other regions in Afghanistan.