Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
Learning From Earthquakes

Social Security Administration Building Damages

  Figure 1. General view of the structure. Figure 2. Heavily damaged interior column.         Figure 3. Collapse of interior partition walls made of concrete blocks along the corridor. Figure 4. Spalling plaster of the exterior infill walls, and heavily damaged exterior concrete column.          

Performance of a strengthened School Building

Original shear walls of the structure along the north-south direction has honeycomb shear cracks in the first three stories with decreasing intensity. Cracks at the base are about a mm wide. Added shear walls for strengthening along the north-south direction show signs of separations at the upper beam and column interfaces for the lower two […]

Main Problem: Fundamentally Flawed Structural Designs

The area has seen a boom in building construction in the last decade, and it is obvious that they had pushed beyond the limits of conventional practice into the realm of improperly engineered and structurally flawed designs. The mistakes are fundamental and obvious. The typical mistakes are soft story, torsion, inadequate lateral strength. Captive column mistake also exists, but at much lesser […]

Seismic Response of Public Buildings and Infrastructural Systems

In the Emilia Romagna Region, nine public buildings are monitored by the OSS (hospitals, infrastructures, schools), concentrated in the east and the Appennine, which is more active from a seismic point of view. Following the May 20, 2012 Emilia earthquake, two monitoring mobile systems have been installed on the Prefectures of Ferrara and Modena. Detailed information on […]

Survey of churches damaged by the May 2012 Emilia-Romagna earthquake sequence

This report presents an overview of the damage that was observed in fourteen churches that were hit by the May 2012 Emilia-Romagna earthquake sequence. The data was collected over the course of a two-day reconnaissance mission that took place on the 9th and 10th of July 2012, and that involved researchers from the Civil engineering […]