Archinect - News

At least 200,000 residential structures in New York City are at risk of seismic damage: NYT

2024-04-11T17:38:00-04:00

The five boroughs are home to more than 200,000 multifamily buildings made with un-reinforced brick and built from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, according to a city hazard plan. Many rowhouses across the city neighborhoods fall into this category. Such masonry cannot bend or flex during an earthquake and would instead break or crumble. A strong earthquake could cause some buildings of this type to collapse.

Last week’s 4.8 magnitude tri-state quake wasn’t nearly as strong as the (estimated) 5.5 magnitude incident that occurred on August 10, 1884, and would have caused $4.7 billion worth of damage to the modern city, according to the New York Times.

Experts have warned that the risk posed to New York City, even after its amended 1995 building codes called for “seismic gaps” between buildings, remains at least faintly plausible.

A 2002 Times article on earthquake preparedness in the Big Apple states the probability of a magnitude 6.0 or higher event occurring even once in the next 19,500 years is still "unlikely."

The USGS-documented sinking of buildings in Manhattan, meanwhile, is happening at a rate of between 1 to 2 millimeters per year.

Strict building codes prevented a larger catastrophe in earthquake-prone Taiwan

2024-04-03T19:22:00-04:00

The 7.4 magnitude that struck eastern Taiwan yesterday has provided evidence as to how the country’s reputedly strong building codes and regulations prevented significant losses of life and property 25 years after another tragic seismic event led to widespread change.

"Taiwan’s earthquake preparedness is among the most advanced in the world," Stephen Gao, a seismologist and professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told the AP. "The island has implemented strict building codes, a world-class seismological network, and widespread public education campaigns on earthquake safety."

This state of preparedness is credited to government action following a September 1999 earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 that caused 2,400 deaths and damage to over 50,000 buildings on the island. Another factor within this are business and governmental conditions inside Taiwan, which is worth comparing to Turkey's response to an earthquake that occurred there the month before the same year...

Istanbul's conservators are scrambling to protect heritage sites from disaster

2023-06-02T11:48:00-04:00

Conservators in Istanbul are racing to safeguard scores of at-risk heritage sites in the wake of Turkey’s deadliest earthquake in modern history, bracing for the probability of an even greater disaster in a city straddling an active faultline.

Consequences of incumbent President Recep Erdoğan’s culture wars and the fallout of a “real-estate mentality that supersedes cultural heritage” have become unnecessary obstacles for volunteers who are up against the impossible challenge of securing 35,000 heritage sites around Istanbul seismically.

February’s deadly Turkey-Syria earthquake primarily affected the country’s easternmost provinces, but still, the metro’s location north of the precarious North Anatolian Fault means the seismic “triage” measures being performed now might not be in place in time for a similar quake scientists say has a very strong likelihood of occurring within the next two decades.

San Francisco has over 3,400 concrete buildings at risk of seismic collapse

2023-05-25T17:00:00-04:00

Famous historic sites, low-income apartments and Twitter's headquarters all appear on a previously unpublished draft list of 3,407 concrete buildings in San Francisco that may be at high risk of collapse in a major earthquake, according to a copy of a city government document obtained by NBC News through a public records request.

The city says the list is still a “preliminary draft inventory” of at-risk concrete structures, some of which were built after 2000, according to NBC. Who will actually pay for the mass retrofits still hasn’t been hammered out yet, leaving many to speculate as to its near-term feasibility. Some engineers expect the compliance effort to take decades. Current U.S. Geological Survey predictions state the Bay Area faces a 20% risk of suffering a 7.5 magnitude quake or higher in the next 30 years.

Twitter's potential move out of its historic Market Street headquarters (which is also one of the buildings on the list) is starting to make a lot more sense.

Los Angeles publishes list of 33 county-owned structures most at-risk in an earthquake

2023-03-30T11:49:00-04:00

In the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Los Angeles County has identified some 33 important structures it says are the most at risk during a major seismic event of that magnitude.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors published a list of at-risk properties owned by the county that must be upgraded in line with modern standards over the next ten years, according to KTLA.

The county has already mandated changes to its building codes that call for similar upgrades to all non-ductile concrete high-rises and soft-story residential structures before the year 2033. Officials are wary of the “Big One” — a magnitude 7.8 or above quake — that would kill as many as 1,800 people and destroy an estimated 2,000 structures in the area per the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

“We never thought that spending the money on retrofitting these buildings was worth the risk,” U...

Devastating 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria

2023-02-06T18:25:00-05:00

Reactions are pouring in following the devastating 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria early Monday morning.

There are no estimates available yet as to the number of structures either collapsed or damaged across the region, but a minimum of 3,400 lives have been lost as a result of the quake and a wave of very powerful aftershocks as concerns grow about both governments' ability to organize civil response efforts in the most impacted regions.

Building collapses have been reported in almost every community near the epicenter. Infrastructure damage appears to be significant as well.

Seismologists say the tremors that rocked Turkey and Syria are likely to be some of the deadliest this decade. Here is what scientists say happened beneath the earth's surface and what to expect in the aftermath https://t.co/vf37HkXHxQ pic.twitter.com/Tu3Kl76wxG
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 6, 2023

Turkey’s largest professional organization for architects and engineers, Türk Mü...

OMA's new pedestrian bridge aims to lead the Mexican city of Jojutla on a path to the future

2021-09-23T19:48:00-04:00

Four years removed from one of the worst natural disasters in Mexico’s history, one small city in the state of Morelos is ready to bridge the chasm between past tragedy and future optimism thanks to the efforts of one New York firm.

Image courtesy of OMA New York

OMA has announced that it will be developing a new pedestrian bridge for the city of Jojutla to coincide with the anniversary of the devastating 2017 earthquake that left much of the city in shambles, and many of its residents to question the viability of the community long term.

Image courtesy of OMA New York

The project is the latest addition to OMA’s ongoing public space and resiliency push that includes a comprehensive post-Hurricane Sandy water use strategy for Hoboken, New Jersey, and the 11th Street Bridge Park development in Washington, DC.

Image courtesy of OMA New York/CCA, Model and Photography by CCA

The new bridge represents OMA New York’s contribution to the region’s ambitious recovery effort. Jojutla has beco...

Los Angeles is making decent progress retrofitting vulnerable "soft story" buildings

2019-11-23T09:00:00-05:00

An earthquake safety revolution is spreading along the streets and back alleys of Los Angeles, as steel frames and strong walls appear inside the first-story parking garages of thousands of apartment buildings. The construction is designed to fix one of the most dangerous earthquake risks: Wood apartment buildings collapsing because the skinny poles propping up parking at the ground level are not strong enough to withstand the shaking.

A building permit analysis conducted by The Los Angeles Times has found that over 27% of Los Angeles’s 11,400 "soft story" wood-frame apartments have been retrofitted since 2015 when the city passed an aggressive seismic upgrading ordinance.

"Soft story" buildings are built with an inadequate amount of shear resistance at their bases, a condition that can cause lower floor walls to snap or skew under the weight of the building above during seismic events.

Statewide earthquake alert system set to debut in California

2019-10-17T15:00:00-04:00

On Thursday, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services will unveil an app created by UC Berkeley that will give all Californians who download it on iOS and Android phones the chance to get earthquake early warnings from any corner of the state. Authorities will also begin issuing quake early warnings through the Wireless Emergency Alerts system, offering text message alerts even for people who have not downloaded the app.

The new warning system will alert Californians who have the app when an earthquake registering at level 3 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale strikes nearby. The state will send out text message alerts over its Wireless Emergency Alerts system to anyone within range of a level 4 trembler.

Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab that helped to develop the app, told The Los Angeles Times,“We cannot promise you a perfect system, [but] the system seems to be performing reasonably well.”

Dozens of buildings at UCLA, UC Berkeley pose "severe" earthquake risks

2019-08-31T09:00:00-04:00

Although no campus buildings were deemed to be in the worst category, “dangerous,” six at UC Berkeley and three at UCLA were found to have a “severe” risk to life. The remaining 62 at UC Berkeley and 15 at UCLA were said to have a “serious” risk to life, according to the first reports released this week in response to a UC Board of Regents 2017 directive calling on every campus to undertake a seismic risk assessment.

The list includes some of both campus's most historic and important buildings, including Berkeley's architecture building, Wurster Hall, and UCLA's Powell Library. A potential 2020 ballot measure and a recently-proposed California State Senate bill could provide funding to make necessary retrofits.

Throwaway cities vs seismic resilience: How American and Japanese buildings don't follow the same path towards earthquake safety

2019-07-31T19:18:00-04:00

Japan, through both government mandates and its engineering culture, builds stronger structures capable of withstanding earthquakes and being used immediately afterward. The United States sets a minimum and less protective standard with the understanding that many buildings will be badly damaged. The two approaches reflect different attitudes toward risk, the role of government and collective social responsibility.

The NYT takes a look at the drastically differing approaches (and ideologies behind them) towards earthquake safety in Japan compared with the United States and asks experts what would be at stake in the greater, urban picture in the anticipated event of a very big earthquake.

"The debate over whether to build more resilient buildings in the United States has been held largely out of public view, among engineers and other specialists," the piece goes. "But at stake is whether places like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Salt Lake City, San Francisco or Los Angeles might be forced to shut down after a direct hit — and for how long."

In this shake table test, the building model on the right is equipped with a seismic base isolation. Image: Valentin Shustov/Wikimedia Commons.

While strict regulations and advances in seismic engineering in Japan appear to favor base-isolated structures to allow tall buildings to resist the shaking ground, the regulation-averse American construction industry over...

A quick refresher on architecture’s continuing battle with earthquakes

2019-07-09T12:45:00-04:00

With earthquakes in the news following a pair of recent tremors in California, it’s important to remember that seismic design is an integral and increasingly complex aspect of building design architects work hard to address. An ever-improving standard, seismic codes not only save lives, but also help to shape the built environment, and in places like California, play a large role in terms of building design, overall.

Below is a round-up of some of Archinect's recent earthquake-related coverage.

Changing seismic codes and other earthquake-related issues are currently coming online in many American cities, including in Seattle, where new seismic standards for tall buildings have prompted worries about the safety of certain types of existing buildings.

Seattle boosts seismic construction standards for new skyscrapers, but older high-rises are biggest concern

In San Francisco, seismic concerns run deeper than meets the eye. There, much of the city's downtown is built atop landfill are...

What we can learn from the devastating earthquake in Indonesia

2018-10-03T20:24:00-04:00

Building codes and standards in many countries require engineers to consider the effects of soil liquefaction in the design of new buildings and infrastructure such as bridges, embankment dams and retaining structures

After the devastating earthquake that hit Indonesia, scientists are relating building collapses to soil liquefaction. When overly saturated soil is heavily loosened by intense seismic activity, particles in the soil lose its bond and contact with each other. Thus resulting in its loss of stiffness and structural support. When soil deposits lose its ability to provide stability for foundations, the land quickly turns into a liquid flowing nightmare.

Dr. Stavroula Kontoe of Imperial College London highlights on this phenomenon and provides a proactive perspective to preventing these disasters from happening in the future. Dr. Kontoe explains that soil liquefaction can be identified early on in a building's design process. If the correct mitigation techniques like soil strengthening and proper drainage systems are applied, areas that are more susceptible have a better chance in recovering from a natural disaster.

Five buildings tilt dangerously after magnitude 6.4 Taiwan quake

2018-02-07T14:39:00-05:00

Yesterday, a magnitude 6.4 quake struck the Taiwanese city of a Hualien, Taiwan. So far, in its wake, the damage has left seven dead and injured 262 others; sixty-three people still remain unaccounted for. according to CNN.

Since, emergency workers have been working diligently to rescue those who remain unidentified. Many are believed to be trapped in the numerous buildings that have caved in and begun to tilt dangerously to roughly 40-45 degree angles. Among these, are four buildings—a 12-story apartment building, two hotels, and a military hospital.

The addition of rain following the wreckage has exacerbated the problem, causing some buildings to tilt at an alarming rate of five cm per hour. Mobile cranes are being used to prop up the leaning structures as rescue efforts continue.

Twenty-four years after the Northridge quake, Los Angeles still has thousands of 'soft-story' buildings to retrofit

2018-01-18T14:08:00-05:00

Los Angeles city officials and property owners are making progress on retrofitting the types of apartment buildings that proved especially vulnerable in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. [...] As of this month, retrofits on 608 “soft-story” buildings are complete and another almost 4,000 retrofits are in progress, according to the mayor’s office. More than 13,000 of an estimated 13,500 soft-story buildings have been issued orders to comply, the first step on the road to retrofitting.

Commemorating the 24-year anniversary of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake which devastated the greater Los Angeles area on January 17, Curbed LA reports about the status of LA Mayor Eric Garcetti's effort to retrofit all of the city's 13,500 "soft-story" buildings — like the ubiquitous, and extremely vulnerable, dingbat-style apartment buildings.

What makes Mexico City so vulnerable to earthquakes?

2017-09-21T11:51:00-04:00

Yesterday, Mexico City was struck by a powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake. As of today, over 200 people have been reported dead as rescuers continue their efforts to recover those still trapped in the rubble. Dozens of buildings in and around the city were reduced to rubble and many more, severely damaged. Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said buildings fell at 44 places in the capital alone, including a primary school where 25 bodies have since been recovered.

The temblor is the deadliest the country's capital has seen since a 1985 earthquake on the same date, exactly 32 years prior, killed thousands. Mexico sits at the boundary of three fault lines—a very active seismic zone that makes the area extremely vulnerable to earthquakes of high magnitude that are capable of destroying whole buildings and ripping façades off others. Just 12 days before, the country endured its second-largest earthquake in history when an 8.1-magnitude shake hit the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Mexico City, i...

World Monuments Fund pledges to help restore earthquake-damaged Kumamoto Castle Town

2017-08-15T13:05:00-04:00

The historic Japanese city of Kumamoto, famous for its picturesque 15th century castle, experienced a damaging earthquake in 2016, leading to the demolition of several of its historic buildings. The World Monument Fund has pledged to help restore the remaining older buildings (although it should be noted that the current iteration of the castle is a late 20th century concrete copy, retaining only a few of the original wooden walls). According to a press release:

About 350 historic buildings essential to the town’s historic streetscape sustained damage in the 2016 earthquake. Some were demolished in the aftermath of the disaster, leaving many of the approximately 300 structures that remained at great risk of demolition. WMF initially joined ICOMOS Japan in an on-site field study in May 2016 to understand priorities and conservation needs, and will now assist KMT [Kumamoto Machinami Trust] in their restoration efforts.

Italian villages destroyed by earthquake won't be able to be rebuilt

2016-08-25T17:45:00-04:00

The head of an influential charity in Italy has said that it is not feasible to rebuild all of the Medieval villages reduced to rubble by yesterday’s earthquake, as it would be too costly and the region has been depopulating anyway. Instead, the strategic plan for the mountainous area northeast of Rome should be “rethought completely”, said Paolo Beccegato, vice director of the Catholic charity Caritas, which has workers assisting in the devastated zone.

The 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit the mountainous area northeast of Rome yesterday morning, affecting 241 towns and killing at least 250 people.

In related news:

Napa Quake a 'Reality Check'

2014-08-27T16:13:00-04:00

Most of the Bay Area roads, bridges, water systems, dams and levees fared well in Sunday's 6.0 earthquake near Napa, but the damage in the picturesque Wine Country town was a jolting reminder of the vulnerability of public services for 7 million people. A Big One -- such as a 7.0 earthquake on the Hayward Fault that runs beneath heavily populated Oakland and Berkeley -- would inflict more damage to key infrastructure, experts said.

Overall, the damage caused by the Napa earthquake could have been a lot worse. But a Los Angeles Times article documenting how even retrofitted historic buildings were damaged showcases the profound vulnerability of older structures in California. According to the article: "The destruction highlights one of the greatest fears of seismic engineers — that the retrofitting of unreinforced masonry buildings still leaves weak joints between bricks." Just yesterday, another LA Times article claimed that thousands of brick buildings across the state have not been retrofitted, disproportionately in low-income areas. And while low-cost retrofitting certainly mitigates the risk of a building "pancaking," but doesn't preclude other potential dangers like falling bricks or collapsed walls. Additionally, commentators are pointing to the Napa earthquake as a "wake-up call" to officials that the state's aging infrastructure is in desperate need of an upgrade. For example, a Forbes article detaile...

Dozens Die In Philippines After Powerful Earthquake

2013-10-15T12:26:00-04:00

"Low-rise buildings collapsed on at least two islands and historic churches cracked and crumbled during the quake," , "which sparked panic, cut power and transport links and forced hospitals to evacuate patients." The quake also damaged tourist attractions, such as the famed Chocolate Hills of Bohol. A photo of the damage to one hill that was by tourist Robert Michael Poole. Churches that have stood for hundreds of years also suffered damage...

Capitol architect seeks funding boost to fix earthquake damage, aging buildings

2012-02-09T15:56:00-05:00

On Thursday, Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers testified before the House Appropriations Legislative Branch subcommittee to explain why the boost is needed for fiscal year 2013. According to Ayers, aging buildings around the Capitol campus and unexpected events, including last year’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake, will require more money.