Andrew Coburn

Strengthening Buildings of Stone Masonry to Resist Earthquakes

Stone masonry buildings are common in many areas in the Alpine-Himalayan earthquake zone, and their failure in recent earthquakes has been the cause of many deaths. Poverty and lack of alternatives prevent the replacement of stone masonry with more ductile materials, but the brittleness of unreinforced stone masonry can be considerably reduced by the incorporation of horizontal lacings of timber or reinforced mortar.

A Global Earthquake Building Damage and Casualty Database

This chapter presents a preliminary overview of the Cambridge University Earthquake Damage Database (CUEDD) now the Cambridge Earthquake Impact Database (CEQID) with emphasis on its human casualty component. CUEDD is based on earthquake damage data assembled by the Martin Centre at Cambridge University since 1980, complemented by other more-recently published and some unpublished data. The database through its organised, expandable and web-accessible format, summarizes information on worldwide post-earthquake building damage surveys which have been carried out since the 1960s (www.ceqid.org). Currently it contains data on the performance of more than 1.3 million individual buildings, in 600 surveys following 50 separate earthquakes. The database provides total recorded casualties (deaths, seriously and moderately injured), and casualty rates as a proportion of population with definitions of injury levels used, and information on dominant types of injury, age groups affected, etc. It also provides geographically disaggregated data where possible, and associates them with tables and GIS maps. Sources of information on other aspects of human casualty information (epidemiological studies, health care impacts, etc.) are provided. Analytical tools enable relationships between casualty rates, building classes and ground motion parameters to be determined.