Projects sited in areas with the worst soil—in high-risk seismic zones and subject to liquefaction—would require more than one geotechnical engineer on the peer-review team.
The city and county Dept. of Building Inspection issued interim guidelines and procedures for structural, geotechnical and seismic-hazard engineering design review for new buildings 240 ft or taller.
Based on 2016 tests of a composite cross-laminated timber-and-concrete floor system, architect-engineer Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has released guidance on how to analyze composite timber floors and predict their behavior in wood frames.
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.