NISEE – the national information service for earthquake engineering

Harvard Physics and Applied Physics Professor Eric Mazur’s video “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer“ provides personal, pedagogical experience centered on an established educational technique now referred to as ‘peer instruction’ – a teaching method in which a question is posed to the class and then students are asked to explain their answers to one another. Professor Mazur’s observation “I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame?…” leads to surprisingly compelling viewing for those teaching (or learning) higher level science and engineering classes. Techniques probably play well with growing online university courses at Coursera.

Some startling statistics regarding natural disasters are displayed on a World Bank, IEG natural disasters website —

But what does 3,852 natural disasters, 780,000 natural disaster fatalities, costs exceeding $960 billion in the last ten years mean for earthquake engineering? Are things becoming worse for earthquake disasters? When examining natural disasters since at least Voltaire’s review of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, two scales are “…generally used to weigh the misfortune of men and estimate their sorrows…” (Candide, 1759) : human mortality and societal costs.

In terms of mortalities, clearly, in the face of an equal number and intensity of shocks as poorer nations, richer nations suffer less deaths from natural disasters. As demonstrated in “The Death Toll From Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography, and Institutions” (September, 2003) by Matthew E. Kahn -when using 1990 as the base economic year and longitudinal disaster information derived from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) – if a nation with a population of 100 million experienced a GDP per-capita increase from $2,000 to $14,000, this nation would suffer 700 fewer natural disaster deaths per year.
— Predicted Annual Death From Natural Disasters –(1990 base year)

GDP Per-Capita	Expected Deaths	Probability Death equals zero
$2,000	893	0.275
$8,000	412	0.279
$14,000	189	0.286

Why would this be so? Convention suggests that as societies develop economically, they can afford the human skills, training, oversight, and physical infrastructure needed to protect against, and respond to, natural disasters. In other words, disaster-mitigating and emergency response measures that reduce fatalities are undertaken by individuals and governments as wealth increases. But, as could also be expected, are reductions in societal losses similarly associated with increased disaster mitigation and emergency response expenditures?

Natural disasters around the world in 2011 caused a record $380 billion in economic losses, more than twice the total for 2010 and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005 (according to a report from Munich Re in Germany). Nearly two-thirds of 2011′s losses are attributable to two earthquakes in highly-developed countries notorious for their disaster mitigation measures and earthquake preparedness: the Tohoku earthquake (M=9.0) and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan in March, and February’s smaller but very destructive earthquake (M=6.3) in Christchurch, New Zealand. [Scientific American, January 12, 2010]

In fact, the Economist magazine reports that four of the five costliest natural disasters since 1980 are earthquakes in developed regions of the world – although the real costs from poorer countries may be underrepresented here since total disaster damage costs are often estimated using an economic multiplier of known insured losses while very expensive and volatile insurance premiums combined with the insurance industry’s limited capacity to absorb extreme risks, prohibit many poorer countries from obtaining any insured losses.

1. Earthquake and tsunami, Japan (2011) –Cost: $235 billion (by the World Bank)

2. Kobe earthquake, Japan (1995) — Cost: $100 billion (by the World Bank)

3. Hurricane Katrina, U.S. (2005) — Cost: $81 billion total damage cost (by NOAA)

4. Northridge earthquake, California, U.S. (1994) — Cost: $42 billion (by NOAA)

5. Sichuan earthquake, China (2008) — Cost: $29 billion (by the World Bank)

Why are these earthquake damage costs so high? A research report commissioned by the re-insurance industry, A Trend Analysis of Normalized Insured Damage from Natural Disasters (Climatic Change, May 4, 2011) by economists Fabian Barthel and Eric Neumayer concluded that “the accumulation of wealth in disaster-prone areas is and will always remain by far the most important driver of future economic disaster damage.” In this study, ‘normalization’ adjusts nominal economic loss from past disasters upwards by multiplying past damage with a factor for inflation, for population growth and for growth in wealth per capita, thus in effect estimating the damage a past hazard event would have caused had it hit the same, but now wealthier, area today.

Relentless commercial and population pressures contribute to the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of people and economic activity in disaster-prone places – on tropical coasts or river deltas, near forests and along known earthquake faults. The Economist magazine reported a 2007 study led by the OECD which “reckoned that by 2070, seven of the ten greatest urban concentrations of economic assets (buildings, infrastructure and the like) that are exposed to coastal flooding will be in the developing world; none was in 2005. In that time, assets exposed to such flooding will rise from 5% of world GDP to 9%. A World Bank study estimated that between 2000 and 2050 the city populations exposed to tropical cyclones or earthquakes will more than double, rising from 11% to 16% of the world’s population.”

This increased exposure to natural disasters may partly derive from a ‘moral hazard’ implicit in both natural disaster risk insurance and an increased reliance on existing disaster mitigating technology regardless of location. But as the Tohoku and Christchurch earthquakes revealed in 2011, naturally occurring incidents, especially the improbable ones, within even the wealthiest countries can still result in many fatalities and very large physical damage losses that multiply through distributed economies. Neither our hazard risk assessments nor our mitigating technology are as advanced as we now need it appears. When populations and productive infrastructure continue to cluster in high risk locations, fatalities may continue to decline as per-capita GDP rises, but societal costs may continue to rise. In 2010, a senior World Bank administrator observed that “If we are ready to invest sizable funds to establish mechanisms to withstand financial crises, we need to do the same with the escalating hazards of nature.” However, a July, 2009 World Bank working paper “The Growth Aftermath Of Natural Disasters” by Thomas Fomby, Yuki Ikeda and Norman Loayza observed that “while the impact of some natural disasters can be beneficial [the authors refer to economic reconstruction mostly] when they are of moderate intensity, severe disasters never have positive effects. … Not all natural disasters are alike in terms of the growth response they induce, and, perhaps surprisingly, some can entail benefits regarding economic growth. Earthquakes have a negative effect on agricultural growth but a positive one on non-agricultural growth.” In earthquake sciences, perhaps some things are never completely worse.

The great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck off the Pacific coast of Japan in March, 2011 compels engineers and policy-makers to reconsider disaster preparedness around the Pacific Ocean. For example, Tohoku earthquake reconnaissance observations by the Structural Engineers Association of Washington (SEAW) [first published in June 2011] provide a short overview with terse implications for the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast.
The ongoing disaster associated with TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power generating plant remains a principal focus of concern – for example several sections of the International Symposium on Engineering Lessons Learned from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Tokyo : March 2012, including the short paper, Katsuichirou Hijikata (Tokyo Electric Power Company), Makoto Takahashi, Takayuki Aoyagi and Mitsugu Mashimo – “Behavior of a Base-isolated Building at Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant during the Great East Japan Earthquake” outlining one of the apparently few, success stories at the site. Many of the symposium papers, including the four papers: [1, 2, 3, 4] from the Symposium section “Damage to Nuclear Power Stations” are now available in Nisee’s e-library. The Symposium section titled simply “Tsunami” provides twenty-one technical papers on tsunami generation and damage caused by large wave run-up often associated with offshore earthquakes around the Pacific Ocean. Another paper by Yoshikazu Takahashi reports damaged rubber bearings and dampers on some highway bridges in the 2011 earthquake suggesting “the Great East Japan Earthquake disproved a widespread myth of the rubber bearing’s safety.”
More popularly, the NY Times recently reported publication of significantly revised tsunami hazard maps for Japan, joining the 2005 national seismic hazard maps for Japan as Northeast, coastal Japan ponders the possibilities of reconstruction.

Andrew Taylor and Ian Aiken provide a short review of reasons for the slow pace of adoption of seismic isolation of buildings in the United States of America compared with other earthquake prone countries in “What’s Happened to Seismic Isolation of Buildings in the U.S.?” in the March 2012 issue of Structure (Volume 19, no. 3) a journal of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations in the U.S.A.

The recently released Grand challenges in earthquake engineering research: a community workshop report (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011) conducted by the Committee for the Workshop on Grand Challenges in Earthquake Engineering Research –A Vision for NEES Experimental Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure Tools, under sponsorship of the the U.S. National Research Council offers a high-level, national, perspective on the future ‘challenges’ for earthquake engineering research and development in the U.S.A.

In observing the one year anniversary of the Tohuku earthquake (Japan, March 11, 2011) and the great waves that obliterated so much of northeast coastal Japan in 2011, issues of scientific earthquake research (for example in: Bulletin of the Earthquake Resistant Structure Research Center, University of Tokyo, March 2011, no 44), and from the 190 papers presented during the recent International Symposium on Engineering Lessons Learned from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (Tokyo Institute of Technology, March 3-4, 2012), and issues of nuclear reactor safety for citizens in areas prone to severe earthquakes and tsunamis are merged into the editorial pages of Japan’s newspapers. The brief comments of the U.S. ambassador to Japan on NPR concerning the dimensions of the challenges for Japan in recovery on the anniversary of the ’311 earthquake disaster’ are informative and hopeful. However, Jerry Thompson’s non-specialist article on the great Cascadia subduction earthquake threat to America in Discover Magazine (March 13, 2012: Extreme Earth Special Issue) is alarming.

As widely reported, around midday of February 22, 2011, a major earthquake (M=6.3) hit the city of Christchurch, New Zealand (population=348,400) six months after the larger (M=7.1, September 4, 2010) Darfield earthquake had produced widespread property damage in the region. The second earthquake, with an epicenter closer to the city center, damaged over 100,000 properties and caused more than 170 fatalities. New Zealand building codes require a building with a 50-year design life to withstand the expected loads of a 500-year event; the ground motions recorded in central Christchurch generally exceeded 2500-year design spectra for most buildings in the city. The maximum recorded peak ground accelerations (PGA) exceeded 1.5g at Heathcote Valley, a suburb eight kilometers southeast of the city center and one kilometer away from the epicenter. (See EERI clearinghouse and NZSEE clearinghouse) Because most of the Christchurch geographic area rests on an alluvial plain vulnerable to severe liquefaction, lifeline infrastructure damage was directly attributed to liquefaction after the earthquake, including severe damage to 80% of the water and sewerage system in the city of Christchurch.

Liquefaction reconnaissance studies after the February 2011 and September 2010 events are extensive. The seismic performance of New Zealand’s use of precast concrete elements in construction has received scrutiny as reported in the PCI Reconnaissance Report Preveiw and a PCI Earthquake Summary. Structural and geotechnical engineering investigations continue.

The wisdom in providing authoritative sources regarding the nature and size of actual and expected aftershocks to area residents trying to balance rational expectations for reconstruction with high levels of uncertainty after a second large earthquake has been pointed out by nisee. In November 2011, the Department of Building and Housing (NZ) provided residents with another helpful report, (possibly not as noticed outside New Zealand but very useful for single family dwellings everywhere), – Revised guidance on repairing and rebuilding houses affected by the Canterbury earthquake sequence. The report introduction states that “increasing the resilience of residential dwellings is an underlying objective” with explicit objectives to provide building repair and reconstruction solutions and options that:

1. are appropriate to the level of land and building damage experienced
2. take account of the likely future performance of the ground
3. meet Building Act and Building Code requirements
4. are acceptable to insurers and property owners.

Forty-one years ago, on February 9, 1971 at 6:01 AM (PST) the destructive San Fernando (Sylmar) California earthquake (M=6.6) occurred, centered in an area of the San Gabriel Mountains near San Fernando. Strong ground shaking lasted about 60 seconds but resulted in property damage estimated at $505 million (1971$), over 2,000 personal injuries and 65 deaths. The USGS reported that surface faulting, which extended roughly east-west for about 15 kilometers, provided a maximum vertical offset measured on a single scarp of about 1 meter, the maximum lateral offset about 1 meter, and the maximum shortening (thrust component) about 0.9 meters. Shaking resulted in dramatic damage at the Olive View and Veterans Administration Hospitals and the collapse of new freeway overpasses. Many older buildings, often of unreinforced masonry construction, in the Alhambra, Beverly Hills, Burbank, and Glendale areas were damaged beyond repair. Water, gas, sewer, and electrical utilities of all kinds were damaged, both above and below ground. Severe ground fracturing and landslides caused extensive damage in areas where faulting was not observed, notably in the Upper Lake area of Van Norman Lakes. Two dams, the Lower Van Norman Dam and the Pacoima Dam, were damaged severely. The severity of the damage near a heavily populated region of the contiguous United States spurred California Governor Reagan’s administration to expand government responsibility in earthquake response and hazard mitigation with some urgency which created a new era in earthquake engineering in the U.S..

As a result, the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act was signed into California law on December 22, 1972 to mitigate the hazard of surface faulting to structures for human occupancy. The devastation caused by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake propelled the California Legislature to pass the Alfred E. Alquist Hospital Seismic Safety Act that requires that acute care hospitals in California be designed and
constructed to withstand a major earthquake and remain operational immediately after an earthquake. Multilateral processes for declaring local, regional and federal disasters were reviewed. In 1975, passage of the Seismic Safety Act established the Seismic Safety Commission to advise the Governor, Legislature, and state and local governments on ways to reduce earthquake risk in California. After the earthquake the California Department of Transportation (CALTrans) instituted an ambitious program of highway bridge retrofits with public overview and evaluation (e.g.: “The Race to Seismic Safety” (Dec. 2003)).

Federally, following extensive scientific investigation lead by United States Geological Survey, the U.S. Congress established the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) when it passed the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, Public Law (PL) 95–124. Congress’ stated purpose for NEHRP was “to reduce the risks of life and property from future earthquakes in the United States through the establishment and maintenance of an effective earthquake hazards reduction program.” NEHRP’s scope recognized that earthquake-related losses could be reduced through improved design and construction methods and practices, land use controls and redevelopment, prediction techniques and early-warning systems, coordinated emergency preparedness plans, and public education and involvement programs.

Now available: the 2012 Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) prepared by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) under the guidance of the National Science Board. This biennial report provides extensive quantitative information on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise. Chapters consist of contents and lists of sidebars, text tables, and figures; highlights; chapter overview and organization; a narrative synthesis of data and related contextual information; conclusion; notes; glossary; and references.

SEI Chapters

• Elementary and Secondary Mathematics and Science Education (456 KB)
• Higher Education in Science and Engineering (395 KB)
• Science and Engineering Labor Force (628 KB)
• Research and Development: National Trends and International Comparisons (692 KB)
• Academic Research and Development (500 KB)
• Industry, Technology, and the Global Marketplace (663 KB)
• State Indicators (8.6 MB)

Appendix tables providing raw, quantitative data will be available online, after February 18, 2012. The chapters of the report, three explanatory sections: About Science and Engineering Indicators (123 KB); Methodology and Statistics (117 KB); and Index (429 KB); and the informative SEI Digest 2012 version are available now.

For interested readers, representative (but hardly exhaustive) findings from one chapter include — Largely uninterrupted since 1953, the U.S. growth in expenditure on R&D continues to exceed growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Over the 5 years, 2004–09, annual growth in U.S. R&D spending averaged 5.8%, compared to annual average growth of 3.3% for U.S. GDP. However, between 1999 and 2009, the U.S. share of global R&D dropped from 38 to 31 percent, whereas Asia’s share grew from 24 to 35 percent during the same time. In China alone, R&D growth increased a stunning 28 percent in a single year (2008-2009), propelling it past Japan and into second place behind the United States in R&D expenditures. In 2009, total U.S. R&D performance was about 19% ($76 billion) for basic research, applied research was about 18% ($71 billion), and development was about 63% ($253 billion). In the U.S., applied research and development is dominated by industry work with significant government funding expenditure. Basic research is dominated by college and university work largely funded by federal government sources. Over the last two decades, the greatest change in federal R&D priorities has been the rise in health-related R&D, which currently accounts for just over half of non-defense R&D spending. In the environmental sciences, growth has not kept pace with inflation. After an upward trend in the number of temporary work visas issued to scientists and engineers for most of the decade, the number fell sharply in 2009. H-1B visas fell to 2003 levels, dropping to 72% of the number issued in 2007. 10% of survey respondents holding a “postdoc” position in October 2008 (9% of postdocs in the biological and agricultural sciences, 5% in the health sciences, 12% in computer sciences and mathematics, 12% in the physical sciences, 6% in the social sciences, and 16% in engineering) reported that they took their current postdoc position because “other employment not available.” Summary information from chapters on “Academic Research & Development” and “State Indicators” comparisons may be part of subsequent posts here.

The engineering industry magazine, ENR – Engineering News Record, has named UC Berkeley Engineering Professor Jack P. Moehle one of their 25 important news-makers of 2011. In recognizing Moehle’s work in advancing “Guidelines for Performance-Based Seismic Design of Tall Buildings“ ENR dubbed him the “‘Seismic’ Skyscraper Engineer.”

Graphic showing fuses (yellow), cables (red) and steel frame (green)

For buildings in regions with high levels of seismicity, engineering teams led by Professor Jerome Hajjar, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and Professor Gregory Deierlein at Stanford University in California devised an experimental scheme using seismic fuses, rocking steel frames that are allowed to uplift during shaking, and post-tensioned vertical cables, and successfully tested [video link] this scheme on the world’s largest shake table, E-Defence in Miki, Japan in 2010. The scheme and the tests are popularly reported in Popular Mechanics, the Christian Science Monitor, and in the Civil Engineering Blog among others. The scheme allows seismic forces to destroy the steel fuse but contains damage to one part of the building so that the ruined fuse can be quickly replaced with another fuse after a major earthquake. The seismic fuse itself is constructed of a sheet of high-caliber steel with diamond shapes cut out of the center. These cut-outs turn the plate into steel ribbons that can twist and deform while absorbing the impact from strong shaking of the building. Two additional elements complement the fuse design – rocking frames which dampen seismic forces by allowing the building to move vertically during strong shaking, and vertical steel cables designed to self-center after an earthquake and avoid excessive or permanent ‘story drift’ that run the height of the building. Laboratory testing demonstrated that the building scheme is both ‘construct-able’ and works successfully in a large, simulated earthquake. But, the increased construction costs of this scheme compared to the costs of most building designs in the USA building inventory, a requirement for a high level of civil engineering expertise and materials to carry out the design, and a conservative culture for building innovation where owners of larger buildings can purchase, sell and re-sell a building many times during a building’s lifespan, probably work against adoption of the engineering scheme. However, for buildings where longer-term ownership expect the building to be operational after strong earthquakes, the adoption of innovative building technologies occurs. Consider the the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), officially opened in February, 2011.

UCSF Stem Cell Research Building (image copyright by Bruce Damonte)

two views ofUCSF Stem Cell Research Building (original images copyright by Bruce Damonte)

Popularly referenced as the UCSF Stem Cell Research Building the structure has caught the attention of the earthquake engineering design and construction community as well as the stem cell biologists it was designed to house. The new 700 foot long serpentine-shaped building provides 70,000 square feet of laboratory and medical facility. It is built on a nearly unbuildable, steeply-sloping site, located not far from the San Andreas Fault, that curves and slopes up to 65 degrees. To achieve a level of seismic performance beyond basic code compliance, an EPS “triple” Friction Pendulum isolation bearing system was integrated into the innovative triangular space frame support structure. The design implements a unique dynamic uplift restraint device to address the narrow building’s expected tendency to uplift during an earthquake. Construction of the building was completed in two and one-half years after the design-build contract was awarded and the innovative building received the award of excellence for new construction from the Structural Engineers Association of California in 2011.