Chile Forum

Thought it would be nice to have a formal thread on the subject, as we just all became experts directly or indirectly on earthquake construction.

The big lesson learned in general, WOOD RULES WHEN IT COMES TO EARTHQUAKE RESISTANCE.

Here is a great web site on the basics of loads, shear-walls, and earthquakes 101:
http://www.mcvicker.com/0001.htm

I did find a link to the FEMA earthquake construction handbook a while ago. It has a fair bit of useful information... some might say it is over building. But as we saw a little over a month ago, there is no such thing.

I think I have it bookmarked on my computer at work. I will take a look for it tomorrow and post it.

Also... I don't think there is such a thing as earthquake-proof. Well at least not on a budget that most of us can afford.

I am just kicking myself for not saving it now, but I found this great study last year of how to make earthquake dampeners out of car tires. Just strips of tread stacked on top of each other between the foundation and cill wall. Total coast, depends on your ability to fanagil a bunch of used tires that are not good for anything else and a few hours to cut them out with a tin snip. They put an adobe / concrete construction and ran it at a 10.0 with no cracks produced.

Put that together with a wood house, properly built to distribute the loads correctly (i.e. second floors proportionate to the first) and I believe you can get NEAR earthquake proof houses.

I ran in to a study earlier tonight reading (again, looking for the link) that showed the major record earthquakes with wood constructed houses and the number of deaths. None were over more than a dozen directly related to the house failure. Even then most were related to the foundation or soil under the house failing. The structures stayed together until the soil liquefied and the foundation failed. Most of those were houses built on a slopes. They covered Alaska and the California earthquakes.

found it.

Look at these numbers:
http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ibp/irc/c ... s-n45.html

By the way most of those houses were not specially designed for earthquakes. They were just average platform style constructions. Put siesmic dampeners and other features on them, and I believe you can have a structure go through at least the worst known (not sure what comes after say a 9.0, that last 10+ mins). So NEAR eathquake proof is possible.

As a civil eng grad(from many years past) I can tell you that there are many schools of thought on the subject.
As a builder I would love to be on the ground at the moment to inspect the various building types and methods and analyse the damage sustained by each.

If you look at that table, even the 20 homes destroyed (4 soil failure), even in the North Ridge eathquake it was 0.0001 failure rate out of 200,000 houses directly effected by a minor 6.7 eathquake.

In Temuco I have sat through several 6.0+ earthquakes since the big one, without bothering to leave the house. none were very long, but I never heard anything in the structure of the wood house I live that would indicate I should be concerned ( Perhaps it is because wood makes noises when it comes apart).

I'm all for a detailed poll of AllChile members of their housing situations objective and subjective.

Cynically, might be a better analysis of the situation than by the "officials."

I think this is the FEMA reference:

http://nehrp.gov/pdf/SeismicWavesOct07.pdf

This may be the tire dampener article:

http://www.californiagreensolutions.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=281

or this?

http://earth911.com/news/2010/03/12/tires-used-to-build-earthquake-resistant-homes/

The indonesia-aid-foundations.org site seems to be dead.

yea, that is one of the methods of using tires. Basically you simply fill the tires with 3/4 rock, and build on top of that. Mostly for light structures. The one I am looking for is a study using the car tread stacked and either glued or nailed together. The nails add strength as they will deform gracefully and act like a cleat, and you can nail them like a board to the sill walls.

Be aware that the State of Washington experimented using ground-up tires in roads a few years ago. They caught fire and smoldered like an underground coal mine fire. Granted, they were ground up and applied with hot asphalt.

How about this?

http://www.saevfors.se/Earth%20quake%20mitigation%20_%20Final%20version.pdf

It may be worthwhile to contact the guy at Colorado State University for his paper.

CONTACT:
Dr. Alan Early
Indonesia Aid Foundation, Inc.
Phone: 970-497-3021
Email address: acearly@colostate.edu