by Bobby Sas
In 2012, Hong Kong’s Geotechnical Engineering Office commissioned a fundamental overhaul of its core methodology for natural terrain hazard assessment. The standard they needed to revise was not advisory guidance. It was the regulatory requirement that every geologist and engineer practicing landslide hazard assessment in the city was legally bound to follow. Getting it right had direct consequences for public safety in one of the world’s most landslide-prone urban environments, home to over seven million people.
The Design Event Approach, the methodology underpinning every Natural Terrain Hazard Study conducted in Hong Kong, had never been systematically reviewed against global best practice or audited for how it was actually being applied in the field. The Geotechnical Engineering Office needed a small, highly credentialed technical team to do that work under a formal government agreement.
I was selected as one of five members of the Technical Review Team. Over roughly eighteen months we produced six government working papers. The scope covered a global literature review of best practice, a systematic audit of every GEO-endorsed hazard study report, a critical analysis of how engineering geological judgment was being applied in practice, a structural review of the methodology itself, an evaluation of the GEO’s administrative framework, and a final summary and recommendations paper. I was lead author of that last one, the paper that turned eighteen months of findings into actionable guidance for the revised standard.
The work required sustained collaboration with government officials, local industry experts, and an independent international reviewer. It also required knowing when to hold a technical position and when to accommodate institutional preferences, a distinction that matters enormously when the output carries regulatory weight.
The six working papers became the direct technical foundation for GEO Report No. 138, Second Edition, the revised regulatory guideline governing all natural terrain hazard study practice in Hong Kong. My authorship is cited in the Foreword and referenced throughout the published document. The revised standard remains the operative regulatory requirement for all natural terrain hazard practitioners in Hong Kong today.
Every geologist and engineer conducting a natural terrain hazard study in Hong Kong works under the standards this team revised.
