Earthquakes and residential construction in Japan

ABSTRACT

While much effort has been spent on analysis of individual structures, building class seismic damage estimators for earthen buildings in seismic zones, of value in disaster planning, code-writing, city planning, national hazards policy formulations etc., have been little investigated. Damage ratios for onset of damage and collapse and for cost of damage are found to correlate best with response spectra at 0.7 s. Using published test data and average building properties, a seismic damage model explains the low-rise building behaviour and permits examination of the effect of structural change ont the estimated damage (AU)