India

Gujurat, India Earthquake Disaster
AE Newsletter - Spring/Summer 2001
In February 2001, Dr. Thomas Boothby traveled to India for the purpose of furthering an NSF-funded collaborative research program with IIT Bombay Department of Civil Engineering, and to take the opportunity to inspect damage from the January 26, 2001 Gujurat earthquake. The research, pursued jointly by Professor Abhijit Mukherjee of IIT/Bombay, Dr. Charles Bakis of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State and Dr. Boothby, is in the long-term durability of concrete and masonry reinforced with fiber reinforced plastic material. Currently, IIT and PSU are testing the susceptibility of concrete reinforced with glass fiber composites to environmental exposure in the Indian (tropical) and the Pennsylvania (temperate) climates. Professor Mukherjee is currently proposing the use of glass fiber wrapping for the repair of earthquake damaged beam-column joints. He is preparing to implement this repair scheme at a heavily damaged fertilizer plant located at the port of Anjar, which needs to return quickly to production. A typical failure mode in a reinforced concrete frame. The column concrete is well-confined where the beams frame into the joint, but above the beams, large reversals of shear and bending moment have caused spalling of the concrete cover. Dr. Boothby also took the opportunity of looking in general at the patterns of damage caused by the magnitude 7.7 earthquake. He spent time in Bhuj, the city that sustained the most casualties. The residential blocks, which are made of reinforced concrete frame infilled with unreinforced masonry, are stiff above the ground floor. However, the buildings are much softer at the ground level, where there are larger openings for storefronts. In many cases, the soft ground story failed while the building above this floor remained more or less intact. Also, many of the older town centers consisted of unreinforced masonry, one or two stories in height, which were reduced to rubble over an area of several blocks. This was a very sobering experience for a structural engineer, as the scale of the damage and the extent of suffering that resulted is beyond human comprehension.

Gujurat, India Earthquake Disaster

AE Newsletter - Spring/Summer 2001

In February 2001, Dr. Thomas Boothby traveled to India for the purpose of furthering an NSF-funded collaborative research program with IIT Bombay Department of Civil Engineering, and to take the opportunity to inspect damage from the January 26, 2001 Gujurat earthquake. The research, pursued jointly by Professor Abhijit Mukherjee of IIT/Bombay, Dr. Charles Bakis of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State and Dr. Boothby, is in the long-term durability of concrete and masonry reinforced with fiber reinforced plastic material. Currently, IIT and PSU are testing the susceptibility of concrete reinforced with glass fiber composites to environmental exposure in the Indian (tropical) and the Pennsylvania (temperate) climates. Professor Mukherjee is currently proposing the use of glass fiber wrapping for the repair of earthquake damaged beam-column joints. He is preparing to implement this repair scheme at a heavily damaged fertilizer plant located at the port of Anjar, which needs to return quickly to production.

A typical failure mode in a reinforced concrete frame. The column concrete is well-confined where the beams frame into the joint, but above the beams, large reversals of shear and bending moment have caused spalling of the concrete cover.

Dr. Boothby also took the opportunity of looking in general at the patterns of damage caused by the magnitude 7.7 earthquake. He spent time in Bhuj, the city that sustained the most casualties. The residential blocks, which are made of reinforced concrete frame infilled with unreinforced masonry, are stiff above the ground floor. However, the buildings are much softer at the ground level, where there are larger openings for storefronts. In many cases, the soft ground story failed while the building above this floor remained more or less intact. Also, many of the older town centers consisted of unreinforced masonry, one or two stories in height, which were reduced to rubble over an area of several blocks. This was a very sobering experience for a structural engineer, as the scale of the damage and the extent of suffering that resulted is beyond human comprehension.

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