Published works

The seismic risk posed by earthquakes to buildings in our major cities in Australia is significant with the world insurance market rating a modest magnitude 6 earthquake occurring in Sydney to be in their world’s top 10 of financial risks.  A major reason for this is that Australia has not designed buildings for earthquake-induced forces until 1995 so that a large portion of our building stock is seismically vulnerable.  As demonstrated in Christchurch New Zealand in 2010-11, a magnitude 6 earthquake can have a devastating impact on a city and country (damage build estimated at ~ 20% national GDP!) even though buildings have been designed for earthquakes for many decades.

This project will sift through the data that is available from the Christchurch experience to establish what earthquake retrofit techniques worked and what didn’t as a starting point in developing a ‘menu’ of economically feasible seismic retrofit techniques that could be used in Australian cities.  This information will then be fed into a ‘decision support tool’ being developed in project A7 that will be used by end users to develop consistent national policies for the application of seismic design of new buildings and retrofit of existing buildings.