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Three-story building
rides out Northridge-sized tests
A full-scale three-story woodframe apartment building
with tuck-under parking sustained only minor to moderate damage
after Berkeley engineers put it through a series of powerful shake
tests at Berkeley's Richmond Field Station in December, observed
by an enthusiastic throng of reporters, students, and researchers.
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| Peg Skorpinski photo |
Engineers retrofitted the structure with steel frames, then subjected
it to motions equivalent to those recorded during the 1994 magnitude
6.7 Northridge earthquake.
"The structural performance of the building was excellent,"
says civil engineering professor and lead investigator Khalid
Mosalam. "Current seismic building codes call for these
woodframe structures with tuck-under parking to be built with
steel frames, but as a retrofit, that had never been put to the
test before."
The shake test is part of a larger $6.9 million project funded
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through the California
Office of Emergency Services. The Consortium of Universities for
Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) manages the project
under subcontract to the California Institute of Technology.
In the Northridge quake, 24 people died as a result of damage
to woodframe buildings, including 16 people in one building with
tuck-under parking. In addition, damage to woodframe structures
caused more than $20 billion in property loss, exceeding the financial
loss from any other single type of building construction from
the quake.
More information
-- including videos -- of the shake test.
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