When is a badly damaged, but stable building safe to enter after an earthquake? That is a question that safety-response and building-department officials have to answer in order to let occupants retrieve important possessions and business records, and to let contractors begin emergency repairs. The obvious time to stay out of a building is immediately following the earthquake and until the aftershocks subside. But those aftershocks can last for days or weeks, asevidenced by recent large earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan. And so, the dilemmafor earthquake survivors is knowing how soon they can go in and how long theymay safely stay in the structure in order to search for survivors and retrievepossessions.
A recent "tech brief" prepared by the Applied Technology Council (ATC), incooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey, offers guidelines for enteringearthquake-damaged buildings under emergency conditions. The guidelines arebased on engineering research by ATC members and aftershock research byscientists at the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif. These guidelines are linked to theATC post-earthquake building safety evaluation procedures referred to as ATC-20. These procedures are widely used by building departments to identify and "flag"unsafe buildings.
How soon a badly damaged but stable building can be entered and how long personsshould stay in it, depends on the degree of damage to the building, theprobability of and the size of aftershocks and the urgency of the need to enter,according to the brief's authors: Ronald P. Gallagher of Gallagher Associates;Chris D. Poland of Degenkolb Engineers; and Paul A. Reasenberg, of the USGS. Tables that summarize the degree of risk for structures, based on the amount ofinitial damage and the probabilities for aftershocks, are included in thereport, with color codes from yellow to red to denote the degrees of risk.
These ATC procedures, which are currently used by many jurisdictions inCalifornia, use color-coded tags on buildings as soon as safety inspectors andemergency-response personnel can make a preliminary survey of the buildings. Because such inspections cannot be done immediately on everystructure, following a large earthquake, ATC TechBrief 2, "EarthquakeAftershocks; Entering Damaged Buildilngs," offers the following guidelines aboutaftershocks and building safety:
Scientists at the USGS began forecasting aftershocks, following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Now, following an earthquake in California of magnitude 5 or larger, the USGS posts the probability of strong aftershocks on its Web site http://quake.wr.usgs.gov.
The ATC Tech Brief on "Earthquake Aftershocks--Entering Damaged Buildings" may be downloaded from ATC's Web site http://www.atcouncil.org, or copies may be ordered from: Applied Technology Council, 555 Twin Dolphin Drive #550, Redwood City, CA 94065.
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