Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Taiwan Earthquake - Beautiful Velocity Pulses

In my humble opinion, peak ground velocity (PGV) is the only engineering parameter worth anything.  Peak ground acceleration is just to mucky, and never correlates with damage.  Lucky for me, the Taiwanese agree, and plot pgv right away.  These are beautiful pulses of 60 cm/s, more than enough to take down buildings, but not those on deep piles to refusal.




The pgv gets long and rumbly on the basins.



The pga plots are pure fuzz.  This was a clean, thrust earthquake, exactly what I expect in Oklahoma.

Appendix

5 cm/s - kills people in stone rubble houses

40 cm/s  - tilts cheap condos by a few inches

50 cm/s - structural damage to houses

60 cm/s - tilts cheap condos by several feet, collapse 70's concrete buildings

80 cm/s - puts condos on their side, total destruction of old building stock

100-200 cm/s (m7-8 thrust) -  Good Luck!

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