On 15 November 2017, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 caused geotechnical damage over a wide area of Pohang, South Korea. In this study, the UBCSAND constitutive effective stress model is calibrated by cyclic direct simple shear (CDSS) tests conducted on a type of sand from liquefied paddy fields at Pohang under confining stresses of 100 and 200 kPa. The calibrated UBCSAND model is then used to

In risk assessment, the exposure component describes the elements exposed to the natural hazards and susceptible to damage or loss, while the vulnerability component defines the likelihood to incur damage or loss conditional on a given level of hazard intensity. In this article, we propose a novel adaptive approach to exposure modeling which exploits Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian updating to implement

This study investigated the undrained seismic bearing capacity of strip footings embedded in two-layered slopes by finite element limit analysis (FELA); in particular, a pseudostatic method was specified to seismic loads. Lower bound theory (LB), upper bound theory (UB), and adaptive meshing technique are employed for exploring the effect of the shear strength ratio of top layer and bottom layer, cu1/cu2;

Through combining a network-based pedestrian dynamics simulation model, simplified probabilistic structural damage assessment, and structural random vibration analysis, a fully random evacuation model is proposed for simulating and analyzing earthquake evacuation processes of multi-story buildings during earthquakes. The model simplifies the simulation of three-dimensional pedestrian dynamics, couples

The 19 September 2017 Puebla–Morelos earthquake provides a unique opportunity to (a) study the effectiveness of seismic rehabilitation methods implemented in Mexico City after 1985 and (b) collect large amounts of data on current building rehabilitation practices. This article presents and discusses seismic rehabilitation efforts conducted on concrete buildings after the 1985 and 2017 earthquakes.

We propose a methodology to implement horizontal-to-vertical Fourier spectral ratios (HVRs) evaluated from strong ground motion induced by earthquake (EHVRs) or ambient ground motion observed from microtremor (MHVRs) individually and simultaneously with the spatial correlation (SC) in a ground-motion prediction equation (GMPE) to improve the prediction accuracy of site effects. We illustrated the methodology

Innovative damage-mitigation technologies have been recently developed to improve the seismic performance of structural and non-structural elements. The combination of these solutions can lead to a high-performance and cost-efficient building system, capable of sustaining earthquakes with limited damage and reduced socio-economic losses. This article investigates the convenience of implementing damage-control

The Taiwan Earthquake Model (TEM) published the first version of the Taiwan probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (named TEM PSHA2015) 5 years ago. For updating to the TEM PSHA2020, we considered an updated seismogenic structure database, including the structures newly identified with 3D geometry, an earthquake catalog made current to 2016, state-of-the-art seismic models, a new set of ground motion

The seismic performance of chimneys associated with permanent residential dwellings and mobile (manufactured) homes is documented via onsite reconnaissance including interviews with Anchorage building officials and contractors familiar with the earthquake damage and recovery efforts. Relatively few chimneys suffered structural damage, and there was no evidence of mobile homes shifting or toppling.

Recent studies have discussed lifeline resilience factors for industrial sectors. However, these results are derived from business surveys on hypothetical disasters or estimations based on expert opinions: this is mainly due to a lack of data from businesses that actually experienced lifeline disruptions after a disaster. Therefore, this study proposes a modeling framework to estimate the remaining

This article focuses on the energy factor of single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems subjected to mainshock–aftershock (MSAS) sequences, of which 163 and 143 are collected from crustal and subduction regions, respectively. The recorded MSAS sequences are divided into four groups based on the relative intensity that is defined as the ratio of the peak ground acceleration (PGA) of an aftershock to the

This article presents a database of ground motions parameters for earthquakes recorded in Japan by the Kiban Kyoshin network (KiK-net). The database includes all earthquakes in the KiK-net website with magnitude larger than three and recorded between 1996 and the end of 2017. In addition to the information KiK-net provides for each event, we have enriched the database using moment tensor solutions

This study deals with selecting optimal seismic retrofit solutions for reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. To this aim, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is implemented explicitly considering earthquake-induced economic loss as a decision criterion. Fragility (i.e. likelihood of damage levels vs intensity measure (IM) levels) and vulnerability (i.e. likelihood of loss levels vs IM levels) relationships

Indonesia is one of the most seismically active countries in the world, and its large, vulnerable population makes reliable seismic hazard assessment an urgent priority. In 2016, the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Housing established a team of earthquake scientists and engineers tasked with improving the input data available for revising the national seismic hazard map. They compiled results

We introduce a Bayesian framework for incorporating time-varying noisy reported data on damage and loss information to update near real-time loss estimates/alerts for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) system. Initial loss estimation by PAGER immediately following an earthquake includes several uncertainties. Historically, the PAGER’s alerting

America seems to have an earthquake investment gap, paying billions more annually on average to recover from earthquakes than it invests to prevent losses beforehand. Two large studies for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Geological Survey (USGS) offer insight into how well American buildings will resist future catastrophic earthquakes. They suggest that the public prefers new

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic caused a human and economic impact of unprecedented magnitude in contemporary history. In an effort to reduce the rate of infection, most governments implemented measures to increase social distancing and to strengthen the capacity of the healthcare system. The occurrence of earthquakes coincident with the pandemic may prevent the effective practice of such measures, and

In December 2018, at the conclusion of its second implementation phase, the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation released its first version of a map outlining the spatial distribution of seismic hazard at a global scale. The map is the result of an extensive, joint effort combining the results obtained from a collection of probabilistic seismic hazard models, called the GEM Mosaic. Together, the

Over 2000 buildings were surveyed by members of the Colegio de Ingenieros (CICM) and Sociedad Mexicana de Ingenieria Estructural (SMIE) in Mexico City following the Puebla-Morelos Earthquake of 2017. This inventory of surveyed buildings included nearly 40 collapses and over 600 buildings deemed to have structural damage. Correlation of damage with peak ground acceleration (PGA), peak ground velocity

Advanced performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE), as documented by FEMA P-58 provisions, can well serve as the bedrock for a building-specific risk assessment framework. The methodology embraces three main sequential steps: collapse assessment, irreparability assessment, and component-wise loss estimation. The consequence of collapse or irreparability is typically assumed to be the total replacement

The number of seismic events induced by the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs has escalated considerably in the last decade. This has raised concerns in several sectors of society, and in consequence, research efforts have been launched to ascertain the risk associated with induced seismicity. This article presents a procedure to quantify potential damages caused by induced seismicity

Nonlinear dynamic analysis techniques have made significant progress in the last 20 years, providing powerful tools for assessing structural damage and potential building collapse mechanisms. The fact that several reinforced concrete shear wall residential buildings underwent severe structural damage in walls at the lower building levels during the 2010 Maule earthquake (Chile) presents a scientific

In contrast to approaches based on scaling of recorded seismograms, using extensive inventories of numerically simulated earthquakes avoids the need for any selection and scaling of motions which implicitly requires assumptions on intensity measures (IMs) that correlate with structural response. This study has the objectives to examine seismogram features that control the collapse response of tall

Wellington city, the capital of New Zealand, experienced substantial damage and impacts from the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, despite its relatively large distance of 60 km from the source of the earthquake. This article draws on impact observations from this event to discuss critical issues for Wellington’s earthquake resilience. Ground motion characteristics exhibiting substantial amplifications in

Seismic isolation is known to effectively mitigate the effects of horizontal ground shaking in building structures. Recent research has suggested that vertical excitation causes high-intensity slab vibrations that lead to nonstructural component damage. A detailed case study of the application of three-dimensional (3D) isolation in a realistic multi-story frame building is presented. Specifically,

The GEM Global Active Faults Database (GAF-DB) is the first public, comprehensive database of active faults with worldwide coverage. The GAF-DB is a compilation of many regional datasets. The GAF-DB contains ∼13,500 faults, each with associated attributes that describe the geometry, kinematics, slip rate, references, and other characteristics, as the information is available. Spatial completeness is

The FEMA P-58 performance-based earthquake engineering methodology was used to assess the economic losses associated with earthquake damage to nonstructural components of two prototype buildings with post-tensioned cross-laminated timber rocking walls. A suite of 22 far-field ground motions were used for nonlinear time history (NLTH) analysis. Truncated incremental dynamic analysis was used to scale

The presence of effective wall-to-diaphragm connections has been shown to significantly improve the global seismic behavior of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. However, despite the importance of such connections, there remains a paucity of experimental research to provide physical validation of current recommendations in design standards and guidelines. The experimental study reported herein included

A framework of agent-based models for housing recovery is presented and used to investigate post-earthquake recovery in the City of Vancouver, Canada. Housing recovery is modeled for a portfolio of buildings, contrasting with the practice of assessing the reconstruction of buildings in isolation. Thus, the presented approach better captures the effect of competition for resources, infrastructure disruptions

In current practice, most earthquake risk models adopt a “declustered” view of seismicity, that is, they disregard foreshock, aftershock, and triggered earthquakes and model seismicity as a series of independent mainshock events, whose occurrence (typically) conforms to a Poisson process. This practice is certainly disputable but has been justified by the false notion that earthquakes of smaller magnitude

In practice, seismic intensity is evaluated in accordance with a macroseismic-intensity scale recognized in the field of seismic engineering globally. The application of different seismic-intensity scales to evaluate the seismic damage of a specific structure due to an earthquake yields diverse results. On this basis, this study compared a few extensively used macroseismic-intensity scales. The results

An intraslab normal-faulting earthquake struck the central region of Mexico on 19 September 2017, leading to the collapse of 44 buildings in Mexico City. After the earthquake, the authors collected information in situ and through social media about the collapsed buildings, which was statistically processed to identify the causes of their collapse. This article presents the main collapse statistics

The 2017 Puebla, Mexico, earthquake event led to significant damage in many buildings in Mexico City. In the months following the earthquake, civil engineering students conducted detailed building assessments throughout the city. They collected building damage information and structural characteristics for 340 buildings in the Mexico City urban area, with an emphasis on the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods

Current seismic design requirements were established considering mainly (almost exclusively) ground motions caused by shallow crustal earthquakes, hence they might lead to different-from-intended risk levels when applied at locations prone to large-magnitude subduction (i.e. megathrust) earthquakes. In this study, the seismic behavior of 40 modern steel special moment frames (SSMFs) subjected to both

In a seismic hazard analysis (SHA), the earthquake loading level should be predicted for one or more ground motion intensity measures (IMs) that are expected to relate well with the engineering demand parameters (EDPs) of the site. In this study, the goal was to determine the IMs that best relate to embankment dam deformations based on nonlinear deformation analysis (NDA) results of two embankment

In seismic design, intensity measures are selected on the basis of how well these parameters correlate with the damage caused by earthquakes and on our ability to predict these intensity measures for a given earthquake scenario. As an index for the energy content of ground motions, Arias Intensity has proved to be efficient in several applications, including the prediction of earthquake-induced slope

This study presents a seismic risk assessment and a set of earthquake scenarios for the residential building stock of the three largest metropolitan centers of Colombia: Bogotá, Medellín and Cali (with 8.0, 2.5, and 2.4 million inhabitants, respectively). A uniform methodology was followed for the development of the seismic hazard, vulnerability, and exposure models, thus allowing a direct comparison

This study presents a large-scale experimental investigation on the seismic performance of an innovative, low-cost seismic isolation system for developing countries. It is based on the beneficial effect of the encapsulation of sand grains between two PVC surfaces on the initiation of sliding and the dissipation of seismic energy between the surfaces. A three-times scaled-down, idealized, seismically

The authors assessed the fragility functions and behavior factors of cross-laminated timber (CLT) structures. The structures derive from the assembly of single CLT wall panels characterized by different configurations. The extended energy-dependent generalized Bouc-Wen (EEGBW) hysteresis model describes their inelastic behavior: the experimental data obtained by Gavric et al. are used to calibrate

We present an evaluation of the 2018 Northern Southeast Asia Seismic Hazard Model (NSAHM18) based on a combination of smoothed seismicity, subduction zone, and fault models. The smoothed seismicity is used to model observed distributed seismicity from largely unknown sources in the current study area. In addition, due to a short instrumental earthquake catalog, slip rate and characteristic earthquake

This article discusses the principal features of Rayleigh surface waves generated by basin-edge effects in Mexico City during the Mw7.1 19 September 2017 Puebla–Morelos, Mexico earthquake. Rayleigh waves were extracted from ground motions recorded at 12 stations in Mexico City. We used a recently proposed method for extracting surface waves, where the earthquake record is filtered based on the normalized

The accumulation of plastic deformations during an intense earthquake may cause structural failures at deformations significantly smaller than those that can be developed under monotonic load. However, there is evidence that, under certain circumstances, the response of a single parameter may not be a good indicator of structural damage. Likewise, most of the seismic regulations, including the Mexican

The rise in the number of anthropogenic small- to moderate-magnitude earthquakes in the central United States raises questions about the damageability of the built environment in such events. This study examines the performance of modern light-frame wood buildings, including single, multifamily, and commercial constructions, in earthquakes with moment magnitudes of 3–6, using dynamic analysis of building

The growth of global ground-motion databases has allowed generation of non-ergodic ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) based on specific on-site recordings. Several studies have investigated the differences between the hazard estimates from ergodic versus non-ergodic GMPEs. Here instead we focus on the impact of non-ergodic PSHA estimates on the seismic risk of nonlinear single-degree-of-freedom

Cordons provide a useful, but challenging risk-management tool for protecting public safety in a post-earthquake environment. There is limited literature on the purpose, complexities, and societal implications of post-earthquake cordons. Using evidence primarily from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and observations from the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, this exploratory study identifies and highlights

Measurement of soil properties under cyclic and dynamic loading conditions is a critical task in the solution of most geotechnical earthquake engineering problems. The main dynamic properties of soils are usually expressed in terms of shear modulus, G, and damping ratio, D, and they are generally obtained from laboratory tests at different strain levels. Dynamic geotechnical problems often require

Bridges tend to sustain excessive seismic demand (e.g. displacement) under pulse-like ground motions attributing to the effect of forward directivity, which is of high likely to occur at locations near the fault rupture. This study tries to incorporate the pulse effect into the probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) and probabilistic seismic demand analysis (PSDA) framework, which are combined

The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of spectral shape on damping modification factors η used in equivalent static and response spectrum analyses of structures with damping ratios that are different from 5% critical damping. Record-to-record variability of η is also evaluated through a statistical analysis of 5270 ground motions records from 1137 interface earthquakes recorded

Retrofitting older reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings aims to mitigate the well-established seismic vulnerabilities of these structures. However, the impact of retrofit design decisions (e.g. increases in strength, stiffness, or deformation capacity) on global performance is unclear because capacity and fragility models for retrofit structures are rare. This study quantifies the benefits of retrofitting

While unprecedented amounts of building damage data are now produced after earthquakes, stakeholders do not have a systematic method to synthesize and evaluate damage information, thus leaving many datasets unused. We propose a Geospatial Data Integration Framework (G-DIF) that employs regression kriging to combine a sparse sample of accurate field surveys with spatially exhaustive, though uncertain

We investigate the extent to which applying high-pass filters to ground motion records affects the collapse capacity of building models. We consider 26 ground motion records from seven large earthquakes and high-pass filter them with corner periods, Tc, ranging from 10 to 60 s. We perform incremental dynamic analysis on 9-, 20-, and 55-story steel moment-frame building models with fundamental periods

In Japan, structural health monitoring (SHM) of building structures began in the 1950s, but, until recently, its widespread use was not realized. A new trend arrived a few years ago, and currently over 850 buildings have SHM systems installed. The most recent SHM systems have been installed voluntarily by owners in the private sector; that is, the major development of recent Japanese SHM has been based

In September 2017, two major earthquakes struck south and central Mexico. These earthquakes produced widespread damage in public and private school infrastructure. In Mexico, all school buildings are classified as essential infrastructure and are expected to attain an immediate occupancy performance level after major earthquakes. However, there is a large variation in the quality of the design and

We develop a ground motion prediction equation (GMPE) for estimating horizontal ground motion amplitudes caused by crustal earthquakes, based on an integrated data set that includes strong motion recordings mainly from Taiwan earthquakes and only from large magnitude earthquakes in the NGA-West2 database. This GMPE is developed for probabilistic seismic hazard analysis study, which is introduced as

We investigate the influence of soil–structure interaction (SSI) and nonlinear soil behavior on the seismic fragility of reinforced concrete (RC) dual (frame + shear wall) buildings resting on shallow foundations. This article includes a holistic methodology to account for nonlinear soil behavior and soil–foundation–structure interaction in a modular way. Using nonlinear dynamic analyses, we derive

This study proposed a simple nonlinear equation to estimate damping modification factors (DMFs) to modify the elastic response spectral values for damping ratios between 10% and 50%. The DMFs are computed from the displacement, acceleration, and velocity response spectral of single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems of 198 earthquake acceleration time histories from 40 earthquakes events of Peruvian

Three locomotives that overturned (toppled) during strong earthquakes (>6.5M) are used as computer analytical case studies. The locomotives were at rest or traveling very slowly at the time of the earthquakes. Fragility curves are presented relating ground shaking intensity to likelihood of toppling. Supplemental studies determine the influence of various parameters, including track gauge, damping

To aid in setting scientific research priorities, we assess the potential value of removing each of the epistemic uncertainties currently represented in the US Geological Survey California seismic-hazard model, using average annual loss (AAL) as the risk metric of interest. Given all the uncertainties, represented with logic-tree branches, we find a mean AAL of $3.94 billion. The modal value is 17

The Japanese Prefecture of Kumamoto experienced a series of strong earthquakes in April 2016 causing widespread damage and had a serious impact on local communities. The events caused over 3000 casualties and affected the continuity of healthcare services. Many hospitals had to be evacuated but the reasons for this evacuation are not clear. This research aims to investigate the impact of damage on

Risk measures are tools that enable consistent measurement of financial risk and quantify the risk exposure to an associated hazard. In finance, there is a broad spectrum of risk measures which reflect different asset performance goals and the risk appetite of the decision-maker. In this study, the authors leverage advancements in financial risk management to examine the role of risk measures to quantify