I am, but I’m not an idiot, even if I did (literally) stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. <g>
Anyway, see, now I already have a vote from Bob for steel braced frames and a dynamic analysis.
Do I have any takers for concrete? Too rigid?
How about more rigid masonry shear walls with wood diaphragms.
From: Neil Moore [mailto:nma@omsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 9:50 AM
To:
Subject: RE: Earthquake-Proof Design
Sorry. I kind of guessed that you might be an architect.
Neil
At 09:39 AM 11/2/2007, you wrote:
Gee whiz….really? What a great idea…..Why didn’t I think of that?
Thanks for the input Neil….Unfortunately, that would give me exactly ONE opinion and as much as I respect the engineer I generally use, that wasn’t the point of the post. I wanted to get a discussion going about more general strategies. I guess we could just go back to the bio-diesel discussion if you’d prefer...
-DB
From: Neil Moore [ mailto:nma@omsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 8:59 AM
To:
Subject: Re: Earthquake-Proof Design
Hire a local structural engineer and a local geologist.
Neil Moore, SE, SECB
At 08:52 AM 11/2/2007, you wrote:
Listen, you clowns…I leave town for one day and come back to 93 messages about just about everything BUT engineering. So, either I start a thread lambasting Prof. Astenah’s cheesy, stinkin’ football team and how we Trojans will be up there soon to kick Bear, OR I will start a new thread about EQ design.
I’ll start with that and see if it morphs into a football board.
I have a client that bought a piece of land in North LA County. I’ve been to the site and it’s a really pretty, sort of bucolic little area full of chaparral and butterflies. Unfortunately, it also has, about a 3 wood away, the grinding fury of two continental tectonic plates sliding by each other. I think they call it The San Andreas Fault.
So, after the preliminary discussion wherein I say, “There is no such thing as an earthquake-proof building…blah blah blah…”, we got serious and he and I agreed that I would try to get as close as I could by affecting the design in such a way that the threat could be minimized.
So, with that in mind, I told him, for instance: Tall building? Not so much….Irregular building with re-entrant corners….not so much….Now, more broadly, the question for the board:
What are the other various strategies that would minimize the risk?
--DB