Scholarly record

ANALYSIS OF HEIGHT CHANGES IN THE OLD HISTORIC QUARTER OF SANDOMIERZ IN THE ASPECT OF THE PROTECTION OF BUILDINGS AND UNDERGROUND INFRASTRUCTURE

Rafal Gawalkiewicz, Anna Szafarczyk

Abstract

The urban structure of the old town quarter in Sandomierz belongs to the oldest and most interesting Polish architectural and archaeological sites. In this part of the town there are several objects written into the register of historical monuments. The location of the town on loess grounds, of a large thickness, has caused a lot of problems for the owners of real estates and the managers of technical infrastructure. This is the result of the characteristics of loess. Loess affected by external factors (rainfall) increases its plasticity and is subdued to suffusion making underground voids, dangerous for the life or residents and the buildings. Until recently, common failures of the water-supply and sewerage system additionally increased the effects of the formation of hollows, posing unpredictable threat to people and property. Sedimentary rock, such as loess is characterized by great variability in the structure of the rock mass in time. This means that in a dry season it gets stratified resulting in cracks and in a wet season it gets plasticity resulting in dislocations. Scientific research carried out until mid 1990s by the AGH-UST team (S. Mularz and S. Rybicki), has not been continued up till now. The town hill is gradually deformed, thus it is necessary to monitor these changes in time, with the available technological, geophysical, geological, geotechnical and geodetic methods. Often, to obtain a quasi-continuous model of information about the degree of terrain deformation in the w analysis of changes and their geometry, the existing elements of the area management are used (surface elements of the infrastructure, permanent elements of the communication network пїЅ curbs, edges of pavements and roads). In case of Sandomierz, many renovation and reparation works, basically exclude the use of information contained in the basic map of the town of Sandomierz. Thus the only reliable source of information is results of the measurements of the points of the state altitude network and the analysis of changes in their altitude in time. The authors of the article presented the results of the analysis of vertical dislocations of the points of the state levelling network in the context of possible threat for the existing buildings and technical infrastructure of the Old Town of Sandomierz.

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