PEER Reports

The core purpose of applied research in the earthquake mitigation field is to assist policymakers. What types of information are required for the creation of
cost-effective policies? Much of the previous social-science-based research on earthquakes has focused on measuring the total economic impact of damage to structures and contents and, more recently, of business interruption.

How are people of all income strata impacted by a major earthquake? Displacement from housing is an obvious aspect, but less obvious is the distribution of job losses associated with earthquake damage...

Considerable research is under way throughout the world to establish performance-based assessment and design methodology for buildings. Japan and the United States are at the forefront of this research effort, as well as efforts to implement the research results. The U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation, sponsored in Japan by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, and in the U.S. by the National Science Foundation, is funding collaborative research in Japan and the U.S. The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center in the U.S. has...

The study of near-field effects has been ongoing since the 1971 San Fernando earthquake in California. However, not until the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the Los Angeles area and the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, where fault ruptures occurred near high-density urban settings, did structural engineers take an interest in how large velocity pulses affect structures. The large velocity pulse is a characteristic of near-field motion, which is described as the cumulative effect of almost all of the seismic radiation concentrated in one location.

To study the effects of the large...

The collapse vulnerability of reinforced concrete building frames constructed before the
introduction of modern seismic codes has been well documented by earthquake reconnaissance, but the mechanisms that lead to collapse are not yet well understood. The collapse of a structure can occur only if the structure loses its ability to support gravity loads. Among other causes, the loss of gravity load capacity can result from column buckling, unseating of the supported beam, P-δ instability, or degradation of axial capacity due to column shear failure. This last cause and the effect of the...