By Rachel Shafer
Khalid Mosalam saw hope in the buildings that stood.
Berkeley engineering professor Nick Sitar (second from left), at the site of the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province, discusses its design and performance in the quake with engineers (from right) Moh Huang, Professor Deng Jianhui of Sichuan University, and two senior engineers working on the dam.
Photo credit: courtesy Nick Sitar
While the world’s attention was pinned to the massive piles of rubble strewn everywhere after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck China’s Sichuan Province in May and killed 69,000 people, Mosalam looked deeper.
“We wanted to study structures that had only minor or moderate damage to learn why they didn’t collapse,” says the UC Berkeley structural engineering professor, who traveled to the quake zone in July and again in October.
Accompanied by Professor Nick Sitar of civil and environmental engineering and faculty from Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, Mosalam visited towns, bridges and a dam and took more than 3,000 photos. To better understand how successful structures were built, he examined blueprints and determined whether buildings followed local codes. From those data, he is planning to create computer models to accurately replicate structures and their performance during the quake. The goal? To develop building design and code recommendations for Sichuan’s reconstruction.
All against a ticking clock. With 4.8 million people left homeless by the quake, China is anxious to rebuild, and Mosalam knows he has a limited window of time to offer suggestions. Together with Chinese colleagues, he hopes by the end of this year to finalize case studies that can shed light on Sichuan’s earthquake-resistant structures and contribute to our collective knowledge of how to build better buildings.
Earthquake engineer Sitar is studying the quake itself to learn why it caused so much devastation. And civil and environmental engineering professor Stephen Mahin, a structural and earthquake expert, is working with the Chinese government to help make reconstruction decisions. The three are in the vanguard of a larger UC-wide initiative to learn as much as possible from the quake and assist its survivors in everything from urban planning to psychiatric healing.
