Cost effective earthquake resisting housing
Qaisar Ali
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan
All natural disasters bring along many useful lessons for the mankind to enable them have improved protection against such calamities in future; so are the earthquakes. The effect of earthquakes on buildings provides valuable information to structural engineers which otherwise would take them decades to learn.
The disasterous Muzaffarabad earthquake of October 08, 2005, has unveiled many hidden facts about the performance of structures; one of which is the behavior of un-reinforced brick masonry (URM) structures.
The URM structures are generally considered as one of the most vulnerable building types. However, the October 08 earthquake has revealed that URM structures could sustain much stronger ground shaking than what is generally perceived about them. This paper describes major reasons of this otherwise unexpected performance of URM buildings and suggests many useful tips for construction of cost effective earthquake safe resistant brick masonry houses. The condition that bulk of building stock in Pakistan, especially in urban housing, comprises low risk (single and double story) brick masonry houses. Keeping in view the unawareness of professionals involved in construction industry about improving the seismic performance of masonry structures, the paper offers many useful proposals/suggestions. |
