| ▲ | ZeroGravitas 20 hours ago |
| Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars. |
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| ▲ | Almondsetat 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is not a good analogy. Crumple zones in cars exist under the assumption that they will not be occupied by humans. In a house, on the other hand, any place could have a person inside of it during an earthquake, meaning that basically the entire house would need to stand to avoid any human being hurt. |
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| ▲ | ZeroGravitas 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not an architect and don't live in an earthquake zone, but I was under the impression that wooden homes flex in earthquakes and if and when they do fall on you, do less damage than concrete homes which are stiff up until a point and then crack and fall. So the human surviving may come at the cost of more houses collapsing. | | |
| ▲ | onlypassingthru 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can personally confirm. Wooden houses do flex and often survive unscathed. The only major damage is usually due to any masonry attached to the house (see: chimney) or the house moving off of the foundation (see: before ties were in the building code). |
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| ▲ | wiredfool 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It absolutely happens in steel and concrete construction in earthquake loading, when loading past the smaller earthquakes. Plastic/non-linear deformation is intended in shear panels of steel connections and the core of well confined concrete beams/columns. The idea is to provide a lot of energy damping due to the nonlinear nature of the f*D hysteresis curve. This works long enough for the earthquake to go away and the people to get out of the building, at which point, you need a new building but hopefully no one has died. |
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| ▲ | earnestinger 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice point. Still, in wast majority of cases, house keeps standing -> habitant survival chance goes up. Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much more relevant |
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| ▲ | hnaccount_rng 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | For inhabitant survival a sifficient goal is something like “remains structurally intact for ~30 minutes after the end of the earthquake”. Which is significantly leas than is required for staying habitable | | |
| ▲ | earnestinger 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Makes sense. I was fixating on the opposition of goals in the car (if car doesn’t bend/deform, then death risk increases). |
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| ▲ | llm_trw 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Where is the crumple zone in the burned out buildings in California? |
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