The magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Kaikoura New Zealand in 2016 caused over 50 landslides along State Highway 1, north and south of the Town. The team of engineers tasked with reopening the corridor to road and rail traffic needed a rockfall barrier system with a small footprint and wanted to incorporate precast blocks being used elsewhere on the corridor for other purposes. They contacted Holmes Solutions to do a full-scale impact test of the system. The precast concrete blocks are what you would see on the roadway side of the barrier. The back side of the barrier system consists of gabion baskets with some kind of sand layer in between the baskets and the blocks. Click on the video to see the outcome of the test!
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Italian Court Action Likely to Harm Efforts to Mitigate Earthquake Losses
On 22 October, 2012, an Italian court convicted six internationally respected scientists of manslaughter. The scientists Enzo Boschi, Giulio Selvaggi, Franco Barberi, Claudio Eva, Mauro Dolce, and Gian Michele Calvi have been sentenced to prison terms, barred from public office, and ordered to pay court costs and damages.
Their offense could have been avoided by precisely predicting the timing and nature of the tragic 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. However, such precise, short-term earthquake prediction of the type evidently sought by L’Aquila is currently impossible. Because of the ungainly complexity of earthquake systems, knowledge of physical details is incomplete; the diverse expressions of earthquake processes deliver contradictory messages; and measurements of earthquake phenomena can be inaccurate. Glaringly, the indictment accused the scientists of having provided “incomplete”, “contradictory”, and “inaccurate” information.
[Editor] Click through for the rest of the press release from the GSA. [/Editor]
The Claremont Tunnel – Designed to Survive Fault Rupture on the Hayward Fault
The Claremont tunnel beneath the Berkeley Hills on the east side of Oakland is a water supply tunnel that serves over 800,000 customers in Richmond, Oakland, San Leandro and neighboring communities. One of the unique things about the tunnel is that it crosses the active Hayward Fault. Most of the time when you talk about designing for earthquakes you’re talking about designing to withstand the seismic forces. In this case, the designers needed the water transmission tunnel to withstand up to 7.5-ft of offset due to fault slip and still maintain a minimum level of service. (Photo credit: Sue Bednarz, Jacobs Associates, Inc. by way of Civil Engineering Magazine)
This post describes the relatively recent Claremont Tunnel Seismic Upgrade Project as reported in Civil Engineering Magazine (May 2008, v. 78, no. 5, pp 58-63, 96-97).