Urban Building Damages in Sichuan Earthquake and Seismic Design Countermeasures in Reconstruction

摘要

The May 12, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China was a mega earthquake with a magnitude of MW 8.0.rnThis paper firstly presents a summary of the observations of building damages in the event. The causesrninducing eight types of building damages are analyzed. The main reason lies that the earthquake groundrnmotion is extremely larger than expected and most of the collapsed building did not have minimumrnseismic capacity. By now, the post-quake reconstruction of the region has been performed over one year.rnThe seismic countermeasures in the reconstruction are proposed herein and have been applied into twornengineering cases. One seriously-damaged primary school in Dujiangyan City was retrofitted byrnapplying structural control concept. The analytical results shows, it is convenient to avoid heavyrnstrengthening work and easy to meet performance objectives of reconstruction. The sustainable materialrn(timber) was used to build another primary school in the city, which will be put into use in the fallrnsemester of 2009.