JAN VINDHYA J.

PRADES
BSCE IV
RODRIGUEZ

CE 534A (5354)
ENGR. MERYL

MAE

2016 Ecuador earthquake

The 2016
Ecuador
earthquake occurred
on
April
16
at 18:58:37 ECT with a moment magnitude of 7.8 and a maximum Mercalli
intensity of VIII. The very large thrust earthquake was centered
approximately 27 km (17 mi) from the towns of Muisne and Pedernales in
a sparsely populated part of the country, and 170 km (110 mi) from the
capital Quito, where it was felt strongly.
of Manta, Pedernales and Portoviejo accounted for over 75 percent of
total casualties. Manta's central commercial shopping district Tarqui was
completely
destroyed.
Widespread
damage
was
caused
across Manabi province, with structures hundreds of kilometres from the
epicenter collapsing. At least 673 people were killed and 27,732 people
injured. Along with the 2016 Sumatra earthquake, which also had a
magnitude of 7.8, it is the strongest earthquake yet to strike in the year
2016. President Rafael
Correa declared
a
state
of
emergency;
13,500 military personnel and police officers were dispatched for recovery
operations.

Sim leads research team to assess earthquake damage

in Ecuador
Sep 22, 2016

By Keith McGuffey

Chungwook Sim, assistant professor of civil engineering at UNL,

recently led a team of researchers to assess damage from the earthquake
that shook Ecuador on April 16, 2016 with a moment magnitude of 7.8.
The earthquake caused more than 660 casualties and over 27,730 people
were injured. The team was formed by the American Concrete Institutes
Committee 133 Disaster Reconnaissance, which strives to produce
detailed surveys and inspections of reinforced concrete structures affected
by earthquakes.
The team consisted of researchers and engineers from University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, Seattle University, and Walter P Moore with faculty and
undergraduate students of Escuela Superior Politcnica del Litoral
(ESPOL). They surveyed low-rise reinforced concrete buildings buildings
less than seven stories tall and collected GPS coordinates, hand sketches
of floor plans, dimensions of structural and non-structural elements,
damage level, photographs, and structural and/or architectural drawings
(if available). They worked long days gathering data on damaged
buildings.
The
data
collected
are
accessible
at http://datacenterhub.org/resources/14160.
The research team surveyed over 170 buildings during their ten days
in Ecuador. In addition to assessing the damage caused by the
earthquake, Sim is attempting to evaluate a simple vulnerability index

which can be used in rapidly assessing the seismic performance of large

building inventories.
Sims team also focused heavily on schools. According to Sim, there is
not a wealth of quantitative data on school structures damaged by
earthquakes. These structures are more likely to have short captive
columns, columns that have adjoining unreinforced masonry walls with
openings at the upper part.
Columns should be able to deform laterally during earthquakes, said
Sim. For a captive column, the adjoining masonry wall restricts the free
movement of the column. This situation introduces large shear stresses at
the top of the column where openings are present. A lot of schools have
these types of walls with windows at top, because it allows natural light
and ventilation into the classroom, but its not structurally ideal during an
earthquake. It causes a lot of damage to the columns.
Sim hopes his teams work will be used by other researchers to study
the performance of concrete structures under earthquake loads. The
results of the survey, including all photographs taken and diagrams
produced, has been published on datacenterhub.org, a cyber-platform for
preserving and sharing large sets of engineering and science data. This
platform was created and developed under the National Science
Foundation CIF 21 DIBBs program and Sim is a co-investigator in this
project.
While surveying the damage of the earthquake, Sim also experienced
his first earthquake.
At first, I didnt know what was going on, said Sim. I was on the fifth
floor of the hotel and the building started shaking. It was one of the four
aftershocks we experienced during our stay in Ecuador.
Sim plans to publish a paper that discuss their survey efforts in an
upcoming issue of Earthquake Spectra. For more information on the
survey teams
findings,
please see their
dataset published
on datacenterhub.org/resources/14160.

Ecuador Earthquake - an earthquake engineer's first

thoughts
by Harriette Stoneat 02:46

Some simple notes on photos from Ecuador following the recent

earthquake
Over the weekend a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the
Pacific coast of Ecuador. Earthquakes are not uncommon here; they
happen in Ecuador and surrounding countries frequently, but this was a
big one.
As an earthquake engineer, I look at the photos of devastation ion the
news and can often see more than just the devastation. The collapsed or
damaged buildings tell me stories of how and why they failed, and most

importantly, what can be done to prevent this kind of disaster in the

future.
Here I will share a few thoughts on photos I have found on social
media. Perhaps it will get you thinking about the reasons that these
tragedies keep on happening. Obviously, these are just my thoughts, and
until engineers get to the buildings and can properly assess the
structures, these are just opinions.
My first impressions are that many of the collapses are reinforced
concrete buildings, i.e. concrete with steel reinforcement bars hidden
inside. Concrete on its own is a great material for withstanding
compression forces (think columns with a weight on top), but it is very
poor at resisting tensile (or pulling) forces. In fact, in practice we often
assume that concrete on its own has zero capacity in tension. So, the steel
is included to enable the material to be strong in tension too. The amount
and the location of the steel reinforcement bars is very important, and is
fairly complex for engineers to design, and for builders to construct. In
earthquake regions it is vital that this, what we call 'reinforcement
detailing', is done correctly to ensure that buildings are earthquake-safe.
Below we can see a reinforced concrete (or RC) building that has
completely collapsed. The floor slabs, which still sit fairly horizontally,
have 'pancaked' down towards the left of the photo. A former white drain
pipe now sits mangled and mostly horizontal. A column, with its
reinforcement bars on show, sits leaning towards the right of the photo,
totally disconnected from the structure it used to hold up. This is what we
as engineers would call a catastrophic failure. These kinds of failure, as
you can imagine, are the ones that kill people, and they can be prevented
by proper design of the reinforced concrete.

Many RC buildings contain masonry walls in between the concrete

columns, as can be seen on the building on the left below. This brick
masonry is very vulnerable to earthquake shaking, especially when it is
unreinforced. In earthquakes it is very common for masonry walls to
collapse and these falling objects can be the cause of some deaths. You
can see below that the masonry walls have simply fallen out of the upper
floors of the building on the left.

In addition to this, it is often not

considered that this infilled masonry
sitting
between
the
reinforced
concrete columns, beams, and slab,
actually significantly alters the
behavior of the structure. The
masonry
stiffens
the
building,
reducing its ability to sway with the
ground shaking caused by the
earthquake. This is an important
design consideration that, when designed properly can be beneficial, but
when it isn't, it can be catastrophic.
The poor performance of masonry
in earthquakes is something I
demonstrate to school children when
I visit them. We use fruitella sweets
to act as the masonry bricks, and a
chocolate roof, and shake the
building, imitating an earthquake.
The children are always so shocked to
see how quickly and easily the model
building collapses (as can be seen
below). We then work out some steps
to make our 'buildings' stronger. With
their engineering hats on, even the youngest of children realized that we
need to stick the bricks together (or in real life reinforce them) and then
stick the walls to the roof, to make a stronger building.
The structure shown, another RC building, has fallen to the right, and it
appears that it has only been stopped from fully collapsing by a structure
further to the right. One of the stories of the building has completely
crushed as we can see a set of green columns all now sitting nearly
horizontally - this may have been a soft-storey, or it may have been
impacted at that level by the building in the far left. The columns at
ground floor level are mangled, broken apart, and one of them appears to
have buckled at mid-height (dead centre in the photograph). Towards the
left of the building at the ground floor, the columns appear to be hanging
in mid-air, indicating that they have broken away from their foundations.
Most connections towards the bottom of the building show damage at the
connection between the beams and columns. Interestingly, the damage is
generally located in the beam elements, not the columns, which is
important. Buildings are usually designed to allow some failure in the
beams, before any failure in the columns. This is due simply to the fact
that if a beam fails, part of a floor might collapse, whereas if a column
breaks, it can lead to much larger collapses. The green elements do
appear to be part of a decorative feature on the outside of the original

building, however, it is likely that

they were also part of the primary
structure of the building.
Overall,
this
is
another
unfortunate example of poor RC
design and construction.
So where does Ecuador, and the
devastated communities who have
lost so much, go from here?
Hopefully it is clear that better
buildings need to be designed and constructed in the place of those that
have collapsed or been damaged beyond repair. This can be done only be
competent engineers, according to strict building codes, enforced during
both design and construction. Retrofit or strengthening of buildings that
survived this time but are still at risk should also be prioritized to protect
occupants during future earthquakes.
Unfortunately, we very often see that in the rush to rebuild (which is of
course completely justified for the short-term social and economic
reasons), sometimes people just paint over the cracks, ignoring the larger
problems. The photo below from Kathmandu shows this happening
literally in the months after the Nepal earthquake last year. Hiding from
the problem will most certainly not take it away. Earthquakes will strike
again. Let's hope Ecuador is more ready next time.