In September 2017, two major earthquakes struck south and central Mexico. These earthquakes produced widespread damage in public and private school infrastructure. In Mexico, all school buildings are classified as essential infrastructure and are expected to attain an immediate occupancy performance level after major earthquakes. However, there is a large variation in the quality of the design and construction practices of these buildings due to age of construction, material quality and availability, and great socioeconomic gaps around the country. In this article, an analysis of the observed damage in public school buildings is presented. The results are analyzed depending on the structural system, construction material, and year of construction. The results showed that damage intensity in seismically designed buildings was significantly lower than that observed in the pre-1985 structures. Load bearing and infill masonry walls were the most damaged structural elements.
The response of mid-rise reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Mexico City after the 2017 Puebla Earthquake is assessed through combined field and computational investigation. The Mw 7.1 earthquake damaged more than 500 buildings where most of them are classified as mid-rise RC frames with infill walls. A multinational team from Colombia, Mexico, and the United States was rapidly deployed within a week of the occurrence of the event to investigate the structural and nonstructural damage levels of over 60 RC buildings with 2–12 stories. The results of the study confirmed that older mid-rise structures with limited ductility capacity may have been shaken past their capacity. To elucidate the widespread damage in mid-rise RC framed structures, the post-earthquake reconnaissance effort is complemented with inelastic modeling and simulation of several representative RC framing systems with and without masonry infill walls. It was confirmed that the addition of non-isolated masonry infills significantly impacts the ductility capacity and increases the potential for a soft-story mechanism formation in RC frames originally analyzed and designed to be bare systems.
For the first time in Mexico, a comprehensive data gathering and analysis project on the seismic performance of school buildings in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquakes was developed. Aimed at supporting the planning and decision-making of the Mexican government’s reconstruction program, school performance was observed and measured in the field. To further evaluate building performance, numerical modeling of archetypical buildings was carried out. Calculated performance was consistent with observed structural damage. Numerical analysis indicated that pre-1985 masonry and concrete buildings are more likely to exhibit damage that could compromise the structural stability. In contrast, recent structures are very likely to attain the immediate occupancy (IO) performance level that is implicitly assumed in school design. Studies indicated that rehabilitated school buildings through wall jacketing in masonry buildings and by adding new concrete shear walls and masonry infills to concrete structures are likely to comply with IO. From the lessons learned, policy, technical, implementation, and sustainability and outreach recommendations are proposed to implement a multiannual, systematic, incremental, and integral strategy for reducing earthquake risk of school buildings in Mexico.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.