News Detail

Can We Improve School Safety in Earthquakes?

7/1/2008

Recent earthquakes in China have reminded us that we are still far from providing appropriate safety for children when their schools are subjected to strong, damaging earthquakes. While we have to wait for the full reports on the behavior of school buildings during this tragic event, what we have seen in the news is similar to the effects of other damaging earthquakes in the past.

The California Field Act, enacted after the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake, was a reaction to the poor behavior of nonreinforced masonry in schools and other buildings. It provided a statewide approach that has paid many dividends in the intervening 75 years.

The January 1999 earthquake that hit the coffee-growing region of Colombia caused the city of Armenia to lose 80% of its school buildings. It was fortunate that it occurred during a school vacation, saving the lives of many children. The children of Bingol, Turkey, were not so lucky. In May 2003, a damaging earthquake hit at night in a city that had several boarding schools, killing many students in their sleep.

The sad news from China and the many past examples of reinforced concrete school building failures during strong earthquakes hits close to home for us in ACI. It raises this important question: Has ACI done enough in the past and what are we going to do in the future to improve school-building earthquake safety?

Undoubtedly, we have done a lot in the past for earthquake safety of reinforced concrete buildings in general. We, at ACI, have the collective knowledge and expertise to close the gap. We just need to rethink our strategy to reach out worldwide to reduce the inventory of dangerous school buildings and to promote guidelines for building new, safer school buildings and strengthening existing ones.

Many members of ACI have worked on the issue. The procedure devised by Ahmed F. Hassan and Mete A. Sozen, "Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Low-Rise Buildings in Regions with Infrequent Earthquakes," was published in the ACI Structural Journal, January-February 1997. This method was based on observations of actual behavior of low-rise buildings during earthquakes and has been calibrated in several earthquakes afterward. It permits the screening of low-rise reinforced concrete buildings for potentially destructive behavior during a strong earthquake.

Another example is the development of IPS-1, Essential Requirements for Reinforced Concrete Buildings, a guide for buildings of limited size and height, based on ACI 318-02, published by ACI in 2002 in English (U.S. customary units and metric) and Spanish (metric). This document is also devoted to low-rise buildings and is applicable to school buildings in earthquake-prone areas.

During the Third International Workshop on Structural Concrete in the Americas, held before the ACI Fall 2005 Convention in Kansas City, MO, a full session was devoted to the DRUCA program (Seismic Vulnerability Reduction in University Campuses throughout the Americas) sponsored by the Organization of American States. Three cases were presented showing what the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica; and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia had done to reduce their inventory of vulnerable buildings. The approach of strengthening university buildings beyond life preservation was common in all these cases, reflecting the heavy investment in equipment and also the grave implications of loss of operation of the building for an extended period of time.

These cases are a few examples of the broad expertise ACI members have on the issue of educational buildings in regions that may be affected by strong earthquakes. What we need to do is to organize this knowledge and experience into a novel approach to reduce the seismic vulnerability of school buildings worldwide.

ACI's Executive Committee is studying a proposal that will set the guidelines for establishing a task group within the Institute to guide us on how to accomplish this goal. We will be informing those members interested in sharing their knowledge and experience on this topic on how to participate.

Luis E. García
American Concrete Institute
luis.garcia@concrete.org

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