Reduction of Structural Damage by Nonlinear Soil Response

Abstract

Following the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the areas with a high density of reported breaks in water pipes in typical residential areas in San Fernando Valley and in Los Angeles often did not coincide with the areas having a high density of severely damaged (red-tagged) buildings. As the former is an indicator of large strains and nonlinear soil response, this observation suggests that the damage to buildings in some areas may have been smaller than expected because the soil dissipated part of the energy of the ground motion by nonlinear response. This paper presents an attempt to quantify this relationship between the density of red-tagged buildings,