WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The 6.0 earthquake that rocked Napa, California, on Aug. 24 is placing the spotlight on efforts by property owners and municipalities to retrofit older buildings and improve their ability to withstand earthquakes.

Researchers affiliated with the Purdue University-led George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) have studied ways to strengthen older masonry- and wood-framed buildings to minimize earthquake damage and save lives.

The city of Los Angeles enacted a law in the early 1980s that required brick buildings to be retrofitted. While many of those retrofitted buildings were damaged in the Napa quake, no lives were lost, according to media reports.

Data recently published by the California Seismic Safety Commission indicates that about 70 percent of the 26,000 brick buildings across California have been seismically retrofitted or demolished, with major cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles requiring action. As many as 8,000 remaining brick buildings are at risk of collapse, data published by the state in 2006 shows.

Smaller cities such as Napa have mandatory rules for retrofitting older buildings, and experts have been reported as saying that might have helped prevent widespread destruction during the recent quake.

The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) reports that while damage still occurred in both retrofitted and un-retrofitted buildings in Napa, no retrofitted buildings collapsed.

Some success stories of buildings that implemented cripple wall retrofits were documented, EERI reports. Efforts are underway to collect detailed performance data to understand the effectiveness of implemented retrofits.

Earthquake engineering researchers working with NEES, a program funded by the National Science Foundation, available to discuss their retrofitting research efforts include:

* Ayhan Irfanoglu, an associate professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, 765-496-8270, ayhan@purdue.edu. He has examined the performance of template reinforced concrete school buildings during recent strong earthquakes in Turkey and Peru.

* John van de Lindt, the George T. Abell Distinguished Professor in Infrastructure at Colorado State University, 970-491-6697, jwv@engr.colostate.edu. His research focuses on retrofitting soft-story wood-frame buildings to improve safety and to avoid soft-story collapse and excessive upper story accelerations.

* Arturo Schultz, a civil engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, 612-626-1540, schul088@umn.edu. His research focuses on the design, analysis and behavior of concrete, masonry and steel-concrete composite structures. His recent research is on the stability of slender masonry walls, distortional fatigue in multigirder steel bridges, lateral stability of pre-stressed concrete girders, evaluation of earth pressure behind highway retaining walls, and the integration of large-scale experiments and numerical simulation of structural systems under three-dimensional loading.

Based at Purdue's Discovery Park, NEES is the product of more than a decade of planning by the earthquake engineering community.

The NEES network infrastructure encompasses management headquarters; 14 earthquake engineering and tsunami research facility sites located at universities across the United States - available for testing onsite, in the field or through telepresence; and cyberinfrastructure operations that connect the work of the experimental facilities, researchers, educators and students. 

Since Oct. 1, 2009, the NEES operations and cyberinfrastructure headquarters has been located at Purdue's Discovery Park, the result of NSF cooperative agreement #CMMI-0927178. NEEScomm is the operations unit at Purdue. 

Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu 

Sources: Ayhan Irfanoglu, 765-49-68270, ayhan@purdue.edu

John van de Lindt, 970-491-6697, jwv@engr.colostate.edu

Arturo Schultz, 612-626-1540, schul088@umn.edu