Posted on 11/13/2006 8:50:12 AM PST by bd476
Engineer Andre Filiatrault expects a major earthquake in Buffalo on Tuesday morning — a temblor as powerful as the 1994 Northridge earthquake that caused $40 billion in damage ...
...Filiatrault and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo plan to subject an entire house to a magnitude-6.7 earthquake Tuesday for a systematic assessment of how a typical wooden suburban home holds up ...
Built to California construction code, the 40-ton building is the largest wooden structure ever tested in a simulated earthquake, the engineers said. ...
The sudden swaying and vibrations will simulate the intensities recorded in the Northridge event, replayed in Buffalo ...
The town house, bolted to a concrete slab as it would be in California, was built ... by a construction crew from California. The shaking will be provided by two powerful hydraulically driven tables ...
The tables are programmed to reproduce the ground shaking that occurred at Rinaldi in the San Fernando Valley at 4:30 a.m. Jan. 17, 1994 ... During the last week alone, the U.S. Geological Survey recorded 317 earthquakes in the state.
... The Northridge quake was the first since 1933 to strike directly under an urban area of the United States. It occurred on a previously unsuspected blind thrust fault — delivering a seismic uppercut to every building in the region — and produced the strongest ground motions ever recorded in an urban setting in North America.
...Twenty-four of the 25 people who died in buildings during the quake were killed inside wood-frame structures, the Buffalo engineers said.
In the 6.9 Hanshin earthquake in Kobe, Japan, the following year, 6,400 people died — almost all ... in wooden houses — and economic losses were estimated at $200 billion.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
They will be showing this test tomorrow live on the Internet beginning at 7:30 a.m. PST.
Click here tomorrow morning to watch the live broadcast of the test.
GUINEA PIG: Earthquake engineers at the University at Buffalo expect to subject an entire house to a 6.7 earthquake on Tuesday, in a systematic assessment of how a typical wooden suburban home should hold up to the rigors of life along the fault line.
I often wonder how they construct these as actual 'simulations'. Are they missing a carpenter mid day because he had a rough night, did the finisher quit yet?
Scientists have been researching the impact of quakes on wood frame buildings. Many deaths have occurred in wood frame structures, especially during the 1994 Northridge California quake and the 6.9 Hanshin quake in Kobe Japan in 1995 where 6,400 people were killed, most in wood frame structures.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at 7:30 a.m. PST, engineers at the University of New York Buffalo will be broadcasting live over the Internet a simulated earthquake shaking test upon a wood frame building built to California standards.
They're looking to see how the specially built structure bolted to a concrete slab will withstand a quake the size of the 1994 Northridge 6.7 earthquake. Expect to see overturned furniture and flying crash test dummies.
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ROFLOL!
There is a whole bunch of "stuff" missing from that "house"
How can they have a valid test without the extra inertia? Thousands of pounds of stuff: roofing, siding, nails, wallboard, plumbing.....
What about rigidity from the missing wallboard?
"The shaking will be provided by two powerful hydraulically driven tables ..."
They aren't actually getting any kind of a test since THERE ISN'T ANY SHAKING in asn earthwuaske, the motion is all vertical in a wave action.
All the standards in California for earthquake, designed by professers and their ilk, based on shaking are actually detremental and in a large earthquake will actually tear the building apart.
That house is not finished, nor furnished.
The photo of the test house was taken during the construction project.
The L.A. Times article is excerpted because of copyright rules, but if you click on the link you will read that the finished house is a furnished stucco townhouse which includes lounging crash test dummies and a car parked in a two car garage.
There is also no date on that photo. It probably was taken sometime during the construction project.
The L.A. Times article is excerpted because of copyright rules, but if you click on the link you will read that the finished house is a furnished stucco townhouse which includes lounging crash test dummies and a car parked in a two car garage.
That's very interesting, Dale. Perhaps the writer of the article got his facts wrong or perhaps the Colorado State University Department of Civil Engineering Professor supervising the test made some faulty calculations.
Either way, they have spent $1.24 million dollars from a grant given by the National Science Foundation.
Hopefully the live broadcast will at least include some scenes of flying crash test dummies.
Wood buildings do better than most in earthquakes. BTW, many of the serious injuries in the Northridge event were from TVs falling off shelves over beds and landing on legs. A wood house would not guarantee against this.
They aren't immune from earthquakes. When the New Madrid fault let go in 1811, it rang church bells in Boston.
WOW, that IS complete.
never mind...
No doubt about it, a flying tv, a walking refrigerator, an over-turning filing cabinet and wall bookshelves bending, twisting and then finally hurtling their contents airborne were a real menace but then I was lucky because my home remained standing.
During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the deaths were caused by collapsing wood frame apartment buildings suddenly reduced from three stories to two and the complete collapse of some freeways with a motorcycle police officer flying off of one of them.
The article also mentions the 6,400 deaths in the Hanshin quake in Kobe, Japan, where most of the deceased lost their lives in wood frame buildings.
Those wood frame buildings had very heavy tile roofs and the framing style is quite a bit different from houses in the US.
You're completely, TOTALLY wrong.
Most of the damage in earthquakes is from side to side motion.
The initial earthquake wave that arrives is the Primary wave, a pressure wave that does cause a vertical motion. However the next wave to arrive is the Secondary wave, follwed by two kinds of surface waves, Love waves and Rayleigh waves. The Secondary waves and Love waves cause severe side to side motion.
In a variety of recent earthquakes strong-motion accelerometers have meaured the actual accelerations caused by eartquakes.
In general, the side-to-side acceleeations are usually twice the vertical acceleration, in many cases stronger than 1 G (the force of gravity on the surface of the earth.)
All the standards in California for earthquake, designed by professers and their ilk, based on shaking are actually detremental and in a large earthquake will actually tear the building apart.
What is it that causes (some) people on FR to believe complete nonsense derived from who-knows-where and to hate scientists?
I mean, you have seen that security cam video from the Kobe quake? Of the TV station with all sorts of crap rapidly sliding across the rooms sideways back and forth?
Afraid this will lead to an update to a very expensive NY Building code. Buildings tumbled like dominoes on 9-11.
This is just a frame building.
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