By Ian Buckle, Shideh Dashti, David Frost, Lee Marsh, Eric Monzon, W. Phillip Yen, Taku Hanai, Jun-ichi Hoshikuma, Kazuhiko Kawashima, Teturou Kuwabara, Hideaki Nishida, Keiichi Tamura, and Shigeki Unjoh.
October 2011. Earthquake Engineering Institute (EERI), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER), and United States/Japan Cooperative Program in Natural Resources (UJNR).
About 200 highway bridges and numerous rail bridges were damaged during the March 11th earthquake by effects ranging from span unseating, ruptured bearings, and column shear failures, to foundation scour and approach fill settlements. The causes can be broadly classified in two categories: ground shaking, including ground failure (liquefaction); and tsunami inundation. The tsunami was responsible for the damage in about one-half of the bridges.
The reconnaissance team investigated 11 bridges, of which two had extensive bearing failures, two had column failures, two had combined bearing and column failures, and four suffered tsunami-related damage (unseated spans, scour, loss of approach fill). The locations and names of ten of the bridges visited are shown in Figure 1. The 11th bridge was the Arakawa Wangan Bridge across the Arakawa River in Tokyo. The performance of five of the bridges is summarized in this report. A detailed description of all 11 bridges is given in a reconnaissance report to be published by the Federal Highway Administration in the near future.
Read the Report: Bridge Performance in the Mw 9.0 Tohoku, Japan, Earthquake of March 11, 2011 (5.4 MB PDF)
