Japan's Standards vs Rest of the World

[epitome1170]

First of all, this is meant to be more of an informative topic and discussion. It is not meant to be offensive to anyone as this is obviously a very emotional time in Japan.

For the past few days, I have heard and read that everyone is lucky that Japan has such high building and engineering standards for seismic events. In my opinion, they should be one of the leaders in this knowledge since they experience more high seismic events than the rest of the world.

However, it got me to thinking about it and since I only do work with the US building codes and am completely ignorant of Japan's codes. How much more advanced are their codes from the rest of the worlds? Or is it just a matter that they have similar codes but that their base shears are so much higher that they have to create buildings for these events?

Does anyone have any practical experience with this?

 

[ishvaaag]

No experience on Japan's ways, only to comment that one thing must bring the other. Living somewhere that a problem is common acquaints the population with the ways to deal with them. Most amazing for those living in countries with moderate seismicity is to see the the skyscrapers sway without spitting a single sheet of glass. Such thing would be unlikely at those places, even if the cladding industry is quite technological all over the world.

As another note, and the Sumatra tsunami serves as comparison, it also would be amazing if they managed to have under 10000 victims toll for a thing like this. It is not only that the warning systems were operative, the population should also be, otherwise such kind of result would be unlikely. After the Sumatra toll, we look in disbelief the official numbers given even as of now 5 days later, yet they could be the product of ability and awareness.

 

[JStephen]

I don't recall seeing any pictures of significant earthquake damage from this recent event (apart from the tsunami). But seems like several years ago in the big earthquake, there were some pictures circulating of damaged or destroyed buildings. While I haven't seen any pictures of damage, the problems at the nuclear reactors in this event were partly due to the earthquake itself. Also, this earthquake was actually offshore, which should have lessened its direct impact. I don't get the impression that they are building invulnerable buildings there while we aren't, though there may be variations in how things are done. Also, in the recent events, were there not such massive destruction from the tsunami, we would probably be seeing coverage of other damage, but the tsunami overshadows the quake itself.

 

[sandman21]

They learned many of there lessons from Kobe. They came here, US, to learn about some residential design, including hiring framers to go to Japan to teacher some common methods.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

I don't know about what their standards are now. But, I believe that (back in the pre-Kobe days) they did not design for ductile failures in seismic events. Instead, they chose to beef up their structures (and their cost) under the assumption that a stronger structure would need to be ductile because it wouldn't fail.

Then Kobe hit and they got a real wake up call... even for may structures that were new and designed well according to their standards at the time.

Not sure what they've done since then. But, since it's been less than 20 years since Kobe, my guess is that only the relatively new construction has any significant ductility.