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Northridge Earthquake: Buildings Behaviour

On January 17, 1994, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Northridge community in Los Angeles, causing widespread damage. The earthquake was particularly devastating due to its epicenter being located under a densely populated area. Buildings constructed after 1970 generally performed better than older buildings due to updated seismic codes. However, issues like soft-first stories and incomplete load paths led to partial or total collapses. Bridges also experienced damage, especially those with brittle piers or irregular geometry. The earthquake highlighted needed improvements to building codes and standards for designing structures to withstand seismic activity.

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27 views

Northridge Earthquake: Buildings Behaviour

On January 17, 1994, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Northridge community in Los Angeles, causing widespread damage. The earthquake was particularly devastating due to its epicenter being located under a densely populated area. Buildings constructed after 1970 generally performed better than older buildings due to updated seismic codes. However, issues like soft-first stories and incomplete load paths led to partial or total collapses. Bridges also experienced damage, especially those with brittle piers or irregular geometry. The earthquake highlighted needed improvements to building codes and standards for designing structures to withstand seismic activity.

Uploaded by

mukund jain
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Northridge Earthquake

Introduction
On Monday, 17th January, 1994 at 4:31 AM, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck
the Northridge community in San Fernando Valley, situated downtown of the city
Los Angeles. It was the United States’ costliest disaster so far. Although
earthquakes of higher magnitudes like Loma Prieta of magnitude 7.1 has also
occurred before in 1989 but due to epicentre being under a heavily populated area,
it caused heavy damage to life and infrastructure. A lot of causalities were
prevented due to early morning occurrence of the disaster and 17th January being
a federal holiday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday). Mainshock occurred on a
previously unidentified fault. Peak horizontal ground acceleration approached
and crossed 1g at many places. Vertical accelerations recorded were also as high
as 0.63g for normal shaking and 1.18g for free-field vibrations at some places. At
that time, Uniform Building Code (UBC) was used as building code. For the area
of Los Angeles, it specified a design spectral acceleration of 0.4g. A plot of the
5% damping SDOF response spectra of the earthquake with a plot of design
spectral acceleration at City Hall grounds, Santa Monica is shown in the Figure
1. The difference between observed and design horizontal spectral acceleration is
quite significant. As evident, even Vertical accelerations are quite significant for
short-period structures. UBC doesn’t consider vertical acceleration in design
except in Cantilever or Post-tensioned elements but high vertical accelerations as
seen in this case compelled engineers to not overlook this factor.

Performance of structures
Buildings Behaviour
Buildings constructed as per the post 1970 seismic codes performed well as
compared to older buildings.
Figure 1 Response spectra, 5% damping, City Hall grounds, Santa
Monica.
Some of the problems seen and lesson learnt by this disaster were as follows
One prominent reason for the total or partial collapse was formation of soft-story
mechanism. Many buildings have basement as open parking space having lower
stiffness and causing excessive deformation and collapse. Soft storey mechanism
can also form at any other intermediate storey too.
A complete load path is utmost important to transmit the seismic forces to
the corresponding resisting elements. As in some cases, shear wall kept
standing without any damage and the structure collapsed.
Unreinforced masonry and non-ductile concrete frame buildings were
found highly safe. Masonry houses with rehabilitation measures like
connecting the floor diaphragms to masonry walls using through bolts and
face plates showed an improvement but still faced severe cracks.
Some structure collapsed due to failure of non-lateral force resisting
element due to absence of proper ductile detailing.
Hospitals and emergency structures designed under stricter provisions
didn’t suffer any structural damage but many of it still became non-
functional due to non-structural damages. Thus, code needs to be modified
so that important buildings should remain functional post-earthquake.

Bridges
Similar to buildings behaviour, bridges designed using post 1970’s codal
provisions performed well as compared to others. Still, there were some
exceptions like SR118 bridge at Mission-gothic designed in 1973 which
collapsed. Short and stiff piers failing in shear was the reason for collapse. Some
major outcomes of this earthquake on bridges are as follows
Steel rocker type old bearings were found highly unstable in lateral loading
causing further damage to girder and bridge deck.
Skew aligned or bridges having irregular plan suffered heavy damages like
the one at Bull creek canyon Channel.
Many failures occurred due to short pier brittle failures and damage to
bridge abutments.
This earthquake was a full-grown test of the seismic standards developed after
the San Fernando earthquake of magnitude 6.6 in the same area in year 1971. The
modifications were further bought in the code and International Building Code
(IBC) was proposed by International code council (ICC) in 1997 used even today.

References
Todd, D. R., et al. 1994 Northridge Earthquake: Performance of Structures, Lifelines and Fire
Protection Systems. No. NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)-5396. 1994.
Porcella, R. L., et al. Accelerograms recorded at USGS national strong-motion network stations
during the Ms= 6.6 Northridge, California earthquake of January 17, 1994. No. 94-141. Dept.
of the Interior, US Geological Survey,, 1994.
Moehle, Jack P. Preliminary report on the seismological and engineering aspects of the
January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake. Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University
of California, 1994.

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