Design Load Evaluation for Tsunami Shelters Based on Damage Observations after Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster Due to the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake

Abstract eng:
Tsunami shelters are of great importance to mitigate casualties by earthquake-induced killer waves, and the design guidelines for their practical design are recently developed by a task committee under the Japanese Cabinet Office, since great earthquakes significantly affecting coastal regions are expected to occur in the near future in Japan. Although they propose a practical design formula to calculate tsunami loads acting on shelters, it is derived primarily based on laboratory tests with scaled models but not on damage observations. It is therefore essential to examine the design loads through comparison between observed damage and structural strength. In December 2004, a huge scale Sumatra Earthquake caused extensive and catastrophic damage to 12 countries in the Indian Ocean. The author visited Sri Lanka and Thailand to survey structural damage due to tsunami, and investigated the relationship between damage to structures, lateral strengths computed based on their member properties, and observed tsunami heights. In the survey, 28 simple structures generally found in the affected coastal regions were investigated. The investigated results show that the design tsunami loads proposed in the guidelines are found rational to avoid serious damage but may not be conservative if the load amplification due to drifting debris is taken into account.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket