Earlier this month, just over two years after Los Angeles passed a law requiring seismic retrofits of older, nonductile concrete buildings, the city’s Dept. of Building and Safety began sending compliance orders to owners.
Steel interests have misgivings about the fairness of a California law, enacted last month, intended to minimize carbon footprints of certain construction materials used in state-funded building projects by requiring all products to have a global warming potential less than the industry average.
Two Applied Technology Council hazard-mitigation projects targeting nonductile concrete buildings are benefitting from information gathered during an Oct. 9-13 reconnaissance trip to Mexico City, less than a month after the Puebla-Morelos earthquake.
Plans to created an elevated public park atop piers that once supported Washington, D.C.’s 11th Street bridges have been slimmed down following an extensive structural study.
In the wake of Sept. 19’s magnitude-7.1 earthquake that killed at least 369 people in Mexico, geotechnical engineers are calling for routine site-response analyses during design to ensure structures in high seismic zones are not “in tune” with their soil.
On the 32nd anniversary of the magnitude-8.1 earthquake that devastated Mexico City on Sept. 19, 1985, 41 U.S. seismic experts were in a workshop near Los Angeles, polishing a new tool to identify "killer" buildings.
Insurance companies, governments and some businesses are looking to engineers to build more-resilient structures to accommodate changing climate and weather extremes.
In earthquake-prone Seattle, developer Wright Runstad & Co. announced the start of construction of Rainier Square Tower, an office-residential high-rise that represents the first use of a radically different core structure.
A standard, industrial robotic arm has “printed” about a third of a 12-meter pedestrian bridge that is destined to span an old Amsterdam canal in the Netherlands as early as next year.