Geostatistical methods are valuable to better understand the spatial distribution of geotechnical parameters at regional scale and to optimize the locations of future ground investigations. This article investigates the use of the kriging interpolation method to extend the knowledge of a specific geotechnical property from a few sites to a broader geographical area with a focus on the Kathmandu valley

In this article, Bayes factors (BFs) are used for selecting and weighting the ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs). BFs are defined as the posterior probability of a model being the best model describing data. The Bayesian framework allows for merging information gathered from available seismic data and the experts’ opinion thus allowing for a bridge between data-driven and non-data-driven methods

A number of simplified methodologies have been developed and used to estimate seismic drift demands in buildings. However, none of them have been systematically tested against a large number of buildings subjected to a diverse set of ground motions. This is partly attributed to the lack of existing databases of building designs, nonlinear structural models, and simulated seismic responses. This article

Wall bushings that connect converter valves within hall buildings and other electric facilities in a direct current (DC) field are indispensable in substations but vulnerable to earthquakes. A finite element model was developed to evaluate the seismic performance of a real ultra-high-voltage (UHV) DC wall bushing. The numerical results show that the maximum stress of the wall bushing during seismic

This article deals with the proper numerical simulation of the response presented by an instrumented damaged-retrofitted building using a low computational cost linear-elastic model, using effective stiffness for its reinforced concrete structural members. The purpose is to identify the most appropriate criteria and considerations and to validate them against the actual behavior of the building registered

This article presents a methodology to spectrally match two horizontal ground motion components to an orientation-independent target spectrum (RotDnn). The algorithm is based on the continuous wavelet transform decomposition and iterative manipulation of the two horizontal components of a seed record. The numerical examples presented follow current ASCE/SEI 7 specifications and therefore maximum-direction

This study presents an efficient algorithm that can be used to simulate ground motion waveforms using the site-based approach developed by Dabaghi and Der Kiureghian, and Rezaeian and Der Kiureghian that not only correspond to a specified seismic scenario (e.g. magnitude, distance, site conditions) but are also certain to achieve a target ground motion intensity measure within a narrow range. The suggested

The incorporation of local amplification factors (AFs) determined through site response analyses has become standard practice in site-specific probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). Another indispensable feature of the current state of practice in site-specific PSHA is the identification and quantification of all epistemic uncertainties that influence the final hazard estimates. Consequently

The satisfactory structural behavior observed during large earthquakes and the high seismicity of the country has conditioned the Chilean society to expect immediate occupancy performance level for their buildings under these extreme events, although the seismic design code in Chile mandates only a scope of life safety performance level. Based on observational and statistical evidence from recent strong

This work evaluates the damage to and collapse of a set of buildings in the September 2017 earthquake in Mexico City; these buildings were also subjected to the September 1985 Mexico City earthquake. These buildings were located in the area of the highest rate of damage or collapse in 1985, but buildings exhibiting significant damage or collapse in 2017 did not possess any retrofitting. The spectral

This article presents the Applied Technology Council (ATC) team’s observations following the 2017 Mw7.1 Puebla–Morelos, Mexico earthquake. The team was deployed in Mexico City to collect seismological, geotechnical, structural, and overall performance information. The focus was on non-ductile concrete structures, to support implementation of recently published FEMA P-2018 procedures and to identify

The corrected 2010 New Zealand National Seismic Hazard Model has been adapted for use in the Global Earthquake Model’s OpenQuake engine through an extensive benchmarking exercise with GNS Science’s legacy Fortran code. Resolution of differences between the legacy code and OpenQuake result in hazard curve output comparisons with discrepancies of less than 3% nationally and remaining discrepancies highlight

Corrigendum to Ground Motion Prediction Equations for Arias Intensity Using the Kik-Net Database. Earthquake Spectra. Epub ahead of print 29 July 2020. DOI: 10.1177/8755293020938815

This article presents the most significant structural response parameters of a railway system analyzed with data gathered during 5 years. The structure is the instrumented curved portion of an elevated railroad that consists of a simply supported beam resting on cantilever columns on soft soil. A monitoring system was implemented to determine, within a few minutes, a preliminary structural state analyzing

Ground motion intensity measures (IMs) were observed to be spatially correlated during past earthquakes. In this article, a new spatial cross-correlation model for a vector-IM, which consists of spectral acceleration (SA) ordinates at 17 periods and six non-SA IMs (e.g. peak ground velocity, Arias intensity, cumulative absolute velocity, and significant durations), is proposed using principal component

Seismic compression is the accrual of contractive volumetric strain in unsaturated or partially saturated sandy soils during earthquake shaking and has caused significant distress to overlying and nearby structures. The phenomenon can be well characterized by load-dependent, interaction macro-level fatigue theories. Toward this end, the Byrne cyclic shear-volumetric strain coupling model is expanded

This study presents a comprehensive open probabilistic seismic risk model for India. The proposed model comprises a nationwide residential and non-residential building exposure model, a selection of analytical seismic vulnerability functions tailored for Indian building classes, and the open implementation of an existing probabilistic seismic hazard model for India. The vulnerability of the building

Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), as a tool to assess the probability that ground motion of a given intensity or larger is experienced at a given site and time span, has historically comprised the basis of both building design codes in earthquake-prone regions and seismic risk models. The PSHA traditionally refers solely to mainshock events and typically employs a homogeneous Poisson process

Recent research has highlighted the usefulness of cumulative absolute velocity (CAV) in several contexts, including using the CAV at the ground surface for earthquake early warning and using the CAV at rock reference conditions for evaluation of the liquefaction risk facing structures. However, there are relatively few ground motion prediction equations for CAV, they are based on relatively small data

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