The 2016 Ecuador earthquake occurred on April 16 at 18:58:37 ECT with a moment magnitude of 7.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII. The very large thrust earthquake was centered approximately 27 km (17 mi) from the towns of Muisne and Pedernales in a sparsely populated part of the country, and 170 km (110 mi) from the capital Quito, where it was felt strongly. of Manta, Pedernales and Portoviejo accounted for over 75 percent of total casualties. Manta's central commercial shopping district Tarqui was completely destroyed. Widespread damage was caused across Manabi province, with structures hundreds of kilometres from the epicenter collapsing. At least 673 people were killed and 27,732 people injured. Along with the 2016 Sumatra earthquake, which also had a magnitude of 7.8, it is the strongest earthquake yet to strike in the year 2016. President Rafael Correa declared a state of emergency; 13,500 military personnel and police officers were dispatched for recovery operations.
Sim leads research team to assess earthquake damage
in Ecuador Sep 22, 2016
By Keith McGuffey
Chungwook Sim, assistant professor of civil engineering at UNL,
recently led a team of researchers to assess damage from the earthquake that shook Ecuador on April 16, 2016 with a moment magnitude of 7.8. The earthquake caused more than 660 casualties and over 27,730 people were injured. The team was formed by the American Concrete Institutes Committee 133 Disaster Reconnaissance, which strives to produce detailed surveys and inspections of reinforced concrete structures affected by earthquakes. The team consisted of researchers and engineers from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Seattle University, and Walter P Moore with faculty and undergraduate students of Escuela Superior Politcnica del Litoral (ESPOL). They surveyed low-rise reinforced concrete buildings buildings less than seven stories tall and collected GPS coordinates, hand sketches of floor plans, dimensions of structural and non-structural elements, damage level, photographs, and structural and/or architectural drawings (if available). They worked long days gathering data on damaged buildings. The data collected are accessible at http://datacenterhub.org/resources/14160. The research team surveyed over 170 buildings during their ten days in Ecuador. In addition to assessing the damage caused by the earthquake, Sim is attempting to evaluate a simple vulnerability index
which can be used in rapidly assessing the seismic performance of large
building inventories. Sims team also focused heavily on schools. According to Sim, there is not a wealth of quantitative data on school structures damaged by earthquakes. These structures are more likely to have short captive columns, columns that have adjoining unreinforced masonry walls with openings at the upper part. Columns should be able to deform laterally during earthquakes, said Sim. For a captive column, the adjoining masonry wall restricts the free movement of the column. This situation introduces large shear stresses at the top of the column where openings are present. A lot of schools have these types of walls with windows at top, because it allows natural light and ventilation into the classroom, but its not structurally ideal during an earthquake. It causes a lot of damage to the columns. Sim hopes his teams work will be used by other researchers to study the performance of concrete structures under earthquake loads. The results of the survey, including all photographs taken and diagrams produced, has been published on datacenterhub.org, a cyber-platform for preserving and sharing large sets of engineering and science data. This platform was created and developed under the National Science Foundation CIF 21 DIBBs program and Sim is a co-investigator in this project. While surveying the damage of the earthquake, Sim also experienced his first earthquake. At first, I didnt know what was going on, said Sim. I was on the fifth floor of the hotel and the building started shaking. It was one of the four aftershocks we experienced during our stay in Ecuador. Sim plans to publish a paper that discuss their survey efforts in an upcoming issue of Earthquake Spectra. For more information on the survey teams findings, please see their dataset published on datacenterhub.org/resources/14160.
Ecuador Earthquake - an earthquake engineer's first
thoughts by Harriette Stoneat 02:46
Some simple notes on photos from Ecuador following the recent
earthquake Over the weekend a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific coast of Ecuador. Earthquakes are not uncommon here; they happen in Ecuador and surrounding countries frequently, but this was a big one. As an earthquake engineer, I look at the photos of devastation ion the news and can often see more than just the devastation. The collapsed or damaged buildings tell me stories of how and why they failed, and most
importantly, what can be done to prevent this kind of disaster in the
future. Here I will share a few thoughts on photos I have found on social media. Perhaps it will get you thinking about the reasons that these tragedies keep on happening. Obviously, these are just my thoughts, and until engineers get to the buildings and can properly assess the structures, these are just opinions. My first impressions are that many of the collapses are reinforced concrete buildings, i.e. concrete with steel reinforcement bars hidden inside. Concrete on its own is a great material for withstanding compression forces (think columns with a weight on top), but it is very poor at resisting tensile (or pulling) forces. In fact, in practice we often assume that concrete on its own has zero capacity in tension. So, the steel is included to enable the material to be strong in tension too. The amount and the location of the steel reinforcement bars is very important, and is fairly complex for engineers to design, and for builders to construct. In earthquake regions it is vital that this, what we call 'reinforcement detailing', is done correctly to ensure that buildings are earthquake-safe. Below we can see a reinforced concrete (or RC) building that has completely collapsed. The floor slabs, which still sit fairly horizontally, have 'pancaked' down towards the left of the photo. A former white drain pipe now sits mangled and mostly horizontal. A column, with its reinforcement bars on show, sits leaning towards the right of the photo, totally disconnected from the structure it used to hold up. This is what we as engineers would call a catastrophic failure. These kinds of failure, as you can imagine, are the ones that kill people, and they can be prevented by proper design of the reinforced concrete.
Many RC buildings contain masonry walls in between the concrete
columns, as can be seen on the building on the left below. This brick masonry is very vulnerable to earthquake shaking, especially when it is unreinforced. In earthquakes it is very common for masonry walls to collapse and these falling objects can be the cause of some deaths. You can see below that the masonry walls have simply fallen out of the upper floors of the building on the left.
In addition to this, it is often not
considered that this infilled masonry sitting between the reinforced concrete columns, beams, and slab, actually significantly alters the behavior of the structure. The masonry stiffens the building, reducing its ability to sway with the ground shaking caused by the earthquake. This is an important design consideration that, when designed properly can be beneficial, but when it isn't, it can be catastrophic. The poor performance of masonry in earthquakes is something I demonstrate to school children when I visit them. We use fruitella sweets to act as the masonry bricks, and a chocolate roof, and shake the building, imitating an earthquake. The children are always so shocked to see how quickly and easily the model building collapses (as can be seen below). We then work out some steps to make our 'buildings' stronger. With their engineering hats on, even the youngest of children realized that we need to stick the bricks together (or in real life reinforce them) and then stick the walls to the roof, to make a stronger building. The structure shown, another RC building, has fallen to the right, and it appears that it has only been stopped from fully collapsing by a structure further to the right. One of the stories of the building has completely crushed as we can see a set of green columns all now sitting nearly horizontally - this may have been a soft-storey, or it may have been impacted at that level by the building in the far left. The columns at ground floor level are mangled, broken apart, and one of them appears to have buckled at mid-height (dead centre in the photograph). Towards the left of the building at the ground floor, the columns appear to be hanging in mid-air, indicating that they have broken away from their foundations. Most connections towards the bottom of the building show damage at the connection between the beams and columns. Interestingly, the damage is generally located in the beam elements, not the columns, which is important. Buildings are usually designed to allow some failure in the beams, before any failure in the columns. This is due simply to the fact that if a beam fails, part of a floor might collapse, whereas if a column breaks, it can lead to much larger collapses. The green elements do appear to be part of a decorative feature on the outside of the original
building, however, it is likely that
they were also part of the primary structure of the building. Overall, this is another unfortunate example of poor RC design and construction. So where does Ecuador, and the devastated communities who have lost so much, go from here? Hopefully it is clear that better buildings need to be designed and constructed in the place of those that have collapsed or been damaged beyond repair. This can be done only be competent engineers, according to strict building codes, enforced during both design and construction. Retrofit or strengthening of buildings that survived this time but are still at risk should also be prioritized to protect occupants during future earthquakes. Unfortunately, we very often see that in the rush to rebuild (which is of course completely justified for the short-term social and economic reasons), sometimes people just paint over the cracks, ignoring the larger problems. The photo below from Kathmandu shows this happening literally in the months after the Nepal earthquake last year. Hiding from the problem will most certainly not take it away. Earthquakes will strike again. Let's hope Ecuador is more ready next time.