The Road to Earthquake Mitigation

 For the big earthquake, it is good that everybody left town.  There is no dealing with that.  However, Toronto should ride out an M5 along that fault with no damage.  I might actually live to see that.

If you accept the physics, then there are things that can be done.  I like this section because it is all 'politically unacceptable' stuff.  As I have said before, Canada should go all in on the Scientific Method and physics, but the recent elections show that isn't going to happen.  

The new 'Emergency Response' building is right in the worst spot, on the worst soil.  Could we have done better?  It is probably built with floopy engineering, like everything else.  I would like to see some hardened facilities.  Humber River Hospital has floors that are warping.  Is that being hardened?

For the first time I see that ramps to bridges are using foam as the support instead of dirt.  This is great.  We'll have some bridges survive, but no ramps to them without this new engineering.

All our new condos can't fly through an M5.  They are soft-storey with 'house of cards' walls for extra parking space.  Every one will need to be evacuated.  

Pickering Nuclear power station should not be 'refurbished', yet it will be.  Wonderful.

Everybody on hard ground will have no damage for an M5.  That is defined by whether you can sink a post hole manually.  Forget some of the really old areas in Toronto, those houses are falling down by themselves, and there's no mortar in the chimneys.

If you are a house owner, mortar your dang chimney!  All the bricks will fall on your fancy bmw.

Okay, I am finished with earthquakes, until the next one.

Revisit of the Great Toronto Earthquake - Part 4

 I am just doing the Big One.  There could be smaller ones before, but these granite suckers tend to go in one shot.

No people, they are all on holiday.  The super-sonic shock wave rips through the whole zone.  There are two parts: the weathered hanging wall, and the solid footwall up the mountain.  The entire lower Hamilton is destroyed with 100 cm/s.   The houses built on the sag ponds are turned to sawdust.

Strangely enough, those houses on solid rock hardly feel it.  Since these waves have shot like a big rail gun, the highest ground motion is to the North and North East, right at Toronto.  Out of the immediate near-field, we get 80 cm/s.  

Our state of earthquake engineering has drifted from physics.  These earthquake ground motions are 'bullwhip fling', not steady sinusoids.  All the soft-story condos are knocked off their foundations.  The big old bank towers are fine.

The bridges are powder.  These ground motions go out and ring the bells in Boston.  Any building on soft soil is destroyed within a couple of hundred km's.  All the nuclear power plants go into emergency shutdown.  Pickering is on a rotten foundation, and goes into nuclear release.  I'm glad all the people are gone.  Who cares about a little C14 if there is a beam on your head?

Darlington nuclear plant shuts down because all the monitoring pressure lines flap around like a bell carousel.  But it is fine.  It's just that no nuclear plant can restart, because it is 40 below outside, and a nuclear plant needs a functioning grid to light up.  We are in the blackest blackout.  Natural gas is gone, since all pipes go through Hamilton.  Yeah, for no people!

Only the anxiety-lefties would care about all this, but they don't do physics.  There is a lot that can be done, but none of the power-groups do physics.  Such fun ---- the end.

 

Revisit of the Great Toronto Earthquake - Part 3

 Into the meat of the thing.

This fault has been popping off M 7's or 8's every 5000 years for 100 million years, more or less.  The displacement for each event is one tenth that of California, but 10 times more stress drop, or intensity.  

Is there evidence of constant movement?  Yes.  The whole area is deformed with earthquake movement.  We have sag ponds, and the footwall ridge.  The hanging wall is busted up, and weathered down to be underwater.  It's all there for the looking, but nobody does.

So, we are going to blow this thing.  For 5000 years, it has been quietly moving along.  Lots of stress arches, like a tunnel in rock.  Nobody suspects a thing, but all the arches have lined up, and the bases are barely holding along the fault zone.  It is a wide fracture zone, not iron plates.

Finally, stress corrosion undermines the first base at the southern end.  This is identical to many others, except for how the dominoes have all lined up to fall.  It blows.  At this moment the weak fault zone acts as a wave guide for a very intense shear wave.  At super-sonic speeds, the shock wave starts and blows through the next base.  Base after base shears though.  We do not have one M7 but 10 M6's, or maybe up a notch, 10 M7's

Different from California, we have solid rock surrounding this.  The initial 'Peak Ground Velocity' in the near-field of the fault is huge.  This is the only measure worth using, the phoney concept of Peak Acceleration has no physics.  The wave is on its way.

The suspense is killing me.  To be continued.

ps in order to reduce the blood, we are assuming everybody got the memo and are visiting relatives in Edmonton, The United States of Alberta.