Baguio City — A Singapore-based public safety company will showcase a new technology that is touted to prevent landslides, rockslides, and mudslides that frequently result in the closure of roads in the different parts of the Cordillera, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) announced over the weekend.

The wire-mesh technology will be tested on a 200-meter, landslide-prone stretch of Kennon Road which will be used by the company to illustrate that there are ways and means to prevent the occurrence of landslides.

Engineer Roy Manao, DPWH regional director, said that representatives of Geobrugg company have inspected the place on Kennon Road where it will apply the wire-mesh technology which is expected to stabilize the areas alongside the historic zigzag road.

With the technology, non-corrosive metal balls will be installed together with wire-rope nets and will use soil or rock nails for flexible slope stabilization.

The anchorage is inflexible and cost-intensive on account of the pre-determined geometric form of the nets and the rigid, narrow anchor spacing, the DPWH said.

Manao said the wire-mesh technology had been tried and tested in Switzerland where the company had changed the shotcrete portions of the slopes, adding this eventually restored the vegetation which helped hold the mountainside soil from being washed away by rains.

The DPWH said the company will install the wire-mesh structure on Kennon Road for free. It will be bringing in the materials to be used just to illustrate that there is a way to restore the vegetation of the barren mountains.

He said the occurrence of landslides, rockslides, and mudslides on major roads in the region is causing inconvenience to motorists and delay in the transport of agricultural products to the market.

If the technology is effective at landslide-prone areas of Kennon Road, Manao said, the DPWH would use at other landslide-prone roads.

He said the Singapore-based company said that not all slope-stabilization methods are not as good as promised because shotcrete covers are unaesthetic.