A large team of EERI members and colleagues will be traveling to Chile next week to document the effects of the massive 8.8 earthquake that struck that country on February 27th. Under the leadership of Professor Jack Moehle of UC Berkeley, EERI is sending this team to bring back lessons for practice and academia in both the U.S. and Chile. Joining Moehle in providing leadership for the overall reconnaissance effort are EERI member Professor Rafael Riddell of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Professor Ruben Boroschek of the University of Chile. The team is organized under the umbrella of EERI's Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) Program, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Many partnering organizations are providing travel support for the LFE team members. The team will regularly post field observations and photographs on EERI's Chile Clearinghouse site: http://www.eqclearinghouse.org/20100227-chile/.

A list of team members as of 3/09/10 is available here:
http://www.eqclearinghouse.org/20100227-chile/eeri-plans

The press release is available here: Download press release

EERI has appointed Reginald DesRoches, Professor and Associate Chair of the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, a native of Haiti and a current EERI Board member, to lead EERI's reconnaissance team to Haiti. He is currently in Haiti under different auspices conducting damage assessment, and is coordinating with various other groups planning to send teams in the next few weeks. Visit the website at: http://www.eqclearinghouse.org/20100112-haiti/   
RECENT POSTS: USGS/EERI Team Report Now Available

Although the quake struck at 3.30 in the morning, I was still awake, enjoying a party with friends in a beach house some 200km (125 miles) north-west of the capital, Santiago.

What struck me was not so much the intensity of the quake but its duration.

It started as an almost indiscernible trembling of the glasses and the furniture in the room, and it grew and grew for what seemed like an eternity.

The lights went out and we realised this was no minor tremor.

We ran out of the house, heading for open space.

Every car alarm in the street was sounding; the trees were quivering and I remember looking up and seeing the telephone lines swaying back and forth as if blown by a gale force wind.

It felt like we were at the epicentre, and it was only hours later that we found out that the real eye of the storm was around 500km further south, close to Chile's second city, Concepcion.

If we felt it this strongly here, what must it have felt like at the epicentre, I wondered.

Silent and dark

Later, I made it back from the coast to Santiago, through Chile's main port of Valparaiso.

There, piles of rubble littered the streets and people had largely deserted the lower reaches of the city, fearing a tsunami.
 
Damage further south, here in Curico, has been far worse than the capital


In Santiago itself, whole areas of the city were still in darkness; tower blocks, usually ablaze with light after dusk, were spookily dark, with no electricity and no running water.

There were cars on the streets, but not many, and their owners were driving cautiously through a city suddenly deprived of its traffic lights.

I drove past my local church - largely intact, but missing its dome, which had crashed to the ground when the quake struck.

I reached my apartment building, silent and dark.

The door was hanging off its hinges, there were cracks in the walls, and flakes of plaster littered the floor. No light, no running water - a pattern repeated across this city of six million people.

But here in Santiago we can count ourselves lucky. Television images from the cities of Concepcion, Constitution, Talcahuano and Curico, close to epicentre, show just how devastating this quake has been.

Highways have been sliced in two and road bridges have collapsed.

It's still not clear how many people have or what the extent of the damage is.

President Michelle Bachelet has spoken to the nation and confirmed that two million people - an eighth of the population - have been affected by the quake which, with a magnitude of 8.8, was one of the strongest recorded.

More than 300 have died and many more are missing.

Fortunately, the Chileans are good at dealing with earthquakes. They have to be: they have a long history of them.

Help has been reaching the stricken areas of the south and Santiago is just about functioning again.

But even so, it will be weeks, if not months, before the country returns to anything like normality, and for some areas, it will take much, much longer than that.

The quake, struck about 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince, was quickly followed by two aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude. The first tremor had hit at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, the US Geological Survey said. Phone lines to the country failed shortly afterwards. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told US network CNN he believed more than 100,000 people had died. The Red Cross says up to three million people are affected.

Applications for the Advanced Masters in Structural Analysis of Monuments and Historical Constructions, approved and financially sponsored by the European Commission within the framework of the Erasmus Mundus Programme, have just opened.

This Master Course is organized by a Consortium of leading European Universities/Research Institutions in the field, composed by University of Minho (coordinating institution, Portugal), the Technical University of Catalonia (Spain), the Czech Technical University in Prague (Czech Republic), the University of Padua (Italy) and the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic). The course combines the most recent advances in research and development with practical applications.

A significant number of scholarships, ranging from 4000 to 24000 Euro, are available to students of any nationality.

The Consortium is also available to host outstanding third-country scholars who are interested in contributing to the Master Course Programme. Interested third-country scholars may receive scholarships for teaching and research activities for a period of up to three months.

Please find full details on the MSc programme, as well as electronic application procedure, on the website:
http://www.msc-sahc.org/

University of Nevada, Reno plans to recognize high-quality graduate student papers by awarding the Nevada Medal for Distinguished Graduate Student Paper in Bridge Engineering.  The cash award is $1,500.  Please visit http://cceer.unr.edu/nv_medal/announce.html for submission instructions and information.  The list of past recipients of this award is posted at http://cceer.unr.edu/nv_medal/winners.html.

A powerful earthquake has struck off the Indonesian island of Java, killing 44 people, officials say.

More than 300 have been injured and it is feared the death toll will rise as many homes have reportedly been buried by a landslide triggered by the quake.  More than 700 houses were badly damaged by the magnitude 7.0 quake, a social affairs ministry official told AP.  The quake struck around 1500 (0800 GMT). Its epicentre was offshore, 115km (70 miles) south-west of Tasikmalaya. Medical teams have been dispatched to the city, where damaged properties included the mayor's home and a mosque. The tremors were felt in the capital, Jakarta, 200km to the north, where hundreds fled into the streets from offices and shops.  A local tsunami alert was issued but revoked shortly afterwards.

Swaying and shaking

One badly hit area was the district of Cianjur, about 100km south of Jakarta, where a landslide has left 40 people missing, feared dead.  In pictures: Indonesia earthquake 'The whole building was shaking' Others were killed when buildings collapsed in Tasikmalaya and in the town of Sukabumi. One villager near Tasikmalaya told Reuters news agency: "Many houses are flattened... Only the wooden houses remain standing. Many villagers are injured, covered in blood." Priyadi Kardono, from the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, told Reuters the death toll could rise as communication with many more remote areas had not been re-established. "Communications with the coastal areas were completely cut... No reports have come from those areas, although we assume those were the most affected ones." Rescue teams in many areas of West Java were said to be clearing away rubble to try to find survivors, local media said. In Jakarta, one eyewitness, who gave his name as Jonathan, told the BBC News website he was on the 28th floor of an office block when the quake struck.   "I went into the meeting room and took shelter under the table," he said. "It went on for about a minute I think - scary.

At least 27 people were injured in the capital, officials said. The quake was also felt 500km away from its epicentre in Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, and on the resort island of Bali.

Seismologists recorded a slight rise in the sea level at Pelabuhan Ratu off the west of the island following the quake, indicating there had been a small tsunami.

In December 2004, an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around Asia.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the most active areas for earthquakes and volcanic activity in the world.

The October 2009 issue of the EERI Newsletter is now available online at:

http://www.eeri.org/site/news/newsletter

Stanford University engineers and others create a structural design that lets buildings rock during earthquakes, then pull themselves into plumb when the shaking stops, confining damage to replaceable steel "fuses." Prof. Greg Deierlein, Civil and Environmental Engineering, explains how he used the worlds largest shake table to test a new steel frame design that confines damage during earthquake shaking to certain easily replaced parts and also lets buildings pull themselves back into plumb after the earthquake.

For more information, you may visit:http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/quake-shaking-design-090109.html

See the press announcement: https://www.nees.org/images/other_documents/PressRelease_NEESinc.pdf
View the detailed public release announcement: https://www.nees.org/images/pdf_documents/OpenFresco-26_Release-Announcement.pdf
Visit the NEES OpenFresco site: https://www.nees.org/it/software/openfresco/
We have uploaded, over the past two weeks, the next version of OpenFresco (Version 2.6).  This version was the basis of our recent (August 21 OpenFresco Advanced User and Developer Workshop (http://nees.berkeley.edu/Events/200908b--workshop-openfresco/index.shtml).  The workshop was attended by more than a dozen participants.  The presentation material for that workshop can be obtained from NEESforge  ( http://neesforge.nees.org/projects/openfresco/) under Docs/workshops/2009 Aug 21 .