Implementing Nepal's National Building Code: A Case Study in Patience and Persistence

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 167-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Arendt ◽  
Ayse Hortacsu ◽  
Kishor Jaiswal ◽  
John Bevington ◽  
Surya Shrestha ◽  
...  

The April 2015 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal revealed the relative effectiveness of the Nepal Standard or the national building code (NBC), and irregular compliance with it in different parts of Nepal. Much of the damage to more than half a million residential structures in Nepal may be attributed to the prevalence of owner-built or owner-supervised construction and the lack of owner and builder responsiveness to seismic risk and training in the appropriate means of complying with the NBC. To explain these circumstances, we review the protracted implementation of the NBC and the role played by one organization, the National Society for Earthquake Technology—Nepal (NSET), in the implementation of the NBC. We also share observations on building code compliance made by individuals in Nepal participating in workshops led by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's 2014 class of Housner Fellows.

Geosciences ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meena ◽  
Tavakkoli Piralilou

Despite landslide inventories being compiled throughout the world every year at different scales, limited efforts have been made to critically compare them using various techniques or by different investigators. Event-based landslide inventories indicate the location, distribution, and detected boundaries of landslides caused by a single event, such as an earthquake or a rainstorm. Event-based landslide inventories are essential for landslide susceptibility mapping, hazard modeling, and further management of risk mitigation. In Nepal, there were several attempts to map landslides in detail after the Gorkha earthquake. Particularly after the main event on 25 April 2015, researchers around the world mapped the landslides induced by this earthquake. In this research, we compared four of these published inventories qualitatively and quantitatively using different techniques. Two principal methodologies, namely the cartographical degree of matching and frequency area distribution (FAD), were optimized and applied to evaluate inventory maps. We also showed the impact of using satellite imagery with different spatial resolutions on the landslide inventory generation by analyzing matches and mismatches between the inventories. The results of our work give an overview of the impact of methodology selection and outline the limitations and advantages of different remote sensing and mapping techniques for landslide inventorying.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jyoti Koirala ◽  
Suman Acharya ◽  
Madhusudan Neupane ◽  
Nimananda Rijal

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-90
Author(s):  
Hassan Abbas ◽  
Jubran Fahad

The phenomenon of liquefaction is one of the most important problems in engineering projects.  It occurs in saturated sandy soils during the occurrence of earthquakes. Methods based on the standard penetration test (SPT) were developed to calculate the liquefaction potential according to the seismic loads. These methods have been developed and updated over time by some researchers. This paper analyses the comparison between methods of calculating liquefaction potential. The case study that was selected for the analysis of the comparison methods is Diyala Governorate soil. The methods that have been chosen for making a comparative analysis are the Japanese method, National Centre for Earthquake Engineering Research 1997 (NCEER) workshop, Task Force Report 2007 (Vancouver) and Boulanger and Idriss 2014. The analysis of results stated that the Boulanger and Idriss method is considered more suitable than others for calculating the potential for liquefaction in Diyala Governorate soil. It is found that the Boulanger and Idriss method has higher safety factor than the two methods (80.7% from Vancouver and 38.8% from the NCEER workshop) and less than the Japanese method  


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Forcellini

Decision making approaches to manage bridge recovering after the impact of multiple hazards are increasing all over the world. In particular, bridges can be considered critical links in highway networks because of their vulnerability and their resilience can be assessed on the basis of evaluation of direct and indirect losses. This paper aims at proposing a new methodology to assess indirect losses for bridges subjected to multiple hazards. The method applied to calculate direct costs is the credited Performance Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) methodology by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) center. Therefore, the main objective of the study consists in the assessment of indirect losses that are generally neglected elsewhere. In particular, the paper proposes to calculate indirect losses from direct costs and to divide them into connectivity losses and prolongation of time. The presented formulation has been applied to a real case study aimed at strengthening a benchmark bridge with several isolated configurations. The results show that the application of the proposed methodology allows to evaluate possible solutions to strengthen the original configuration.


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