Geological Risk Hazardous Potentials of Buraydah City, Saudi Arabia

Buraydah is the capital city of Al-Qassim Region and located in the northcentral of Saudi Arabia at the heart of the Arabian Peninsula. Buraydah lies at equidistant from the Red Sea to the west and Arabian Gulf to the east. It is a part of the Buraydah quadrangle. The entire Buraydah quadrangle is underlain by Phanerozoic sedimentary rocks of the western edge of the sedimentary basin that occupies the Arabian shield. These sedimentary rocks are cropped out and have been separated by depressions of varied width commonly occupied by eolian deposits (nafud). Buraydah quadrangle is part of Unayzah Formation. In general, the Unayzah Formation is composed of cycles of cross-bedded, fine to coarse grained quartz sandstones, siltstone, vary colored clay stones, and thin beds of argillaceous limestone. Such deposits cover a substantial area in the eastern part of the quadrangle. Buraydah has a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh), with long, extremely hot summers and short, very mild winters. Precipitation is very low, which falls almost entirely between November and May, leaving summers extremely dry. The city is known for its dates festival which is the biggest in the world with various types of dates, it’s called the city of dates. On November 8, 2021, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization "UNESCO" included the city of Buraydah within the UNESCO Network of Creative Cities, in the field of gastronomy. It has experienced a very high rates of population growth, in 2010 it was 614,093 growing to an estimation of 745,353 in 2021. The sewage services of Buraydah is still under processing. The main procedure applied there is digging and rebuilding a wide hole in front of each building to collect the sewage water in it and artificially dewatered by time to time. Different types of geological hazards are noted including land subsidence and earth fissures, sinkholes, expansive soils, and flash floods. A wide variety of recent geological hazards have been reported in several areas, causing significant human and property losses. Human activities, most notably groundwater extraction, infrastructure development, and agricultural activities, have induced unstable conditions.