Letter from WHE
Hello Liang Jingyu,
The World Housing Encyclopedia (WHE) project would be happy to facilitate
connections between experts around the world and people in China. As Kevin
mentions in his article, the WHE is a project of the Earthquake Engineering
Research Institute and the International Association for Earthquake
Engineering. Over the past few years, we have been working primarily with
structural engineering colleagues at IEM of the China Earthquake
Administration. Our website
has tutorials on various construction materials (confined masonry, adobe, RC
frames with infills), as well as descriptions of construction types in many
countries around the world. www.world-housing.net. If you have trouble
finding the tutorials, I can send them to you as pdfs.
There was recently (last January) a meeting in India on confined masonry
construction with a number of experts from the around the world, active in
the WHE. I would suggest that confined
masonry is one construction alternative that should be considered very
seriously in the rebuilding in China, as, in general, it performs much
better in earthquakes than RC frames with infill. It would be appropriate
for low to mid-rise construction, including schools. We have a draft website
just for confined masonry at http://www.confinedmasonry.org.
Peru also has relevant experience with schools in particular–they had a
damaging earthquake where many schools collapsed and then changed their
codes and in this last earthquake (2007) schools that had been built with
the new code performed very well. We can link you up with people to talk
about this if you are interested.
(also I suppose you know that CEA is organizing the 14th World Conference on
Earthquake Engineering, to be held in Beijing in October [planned for many
years before the earthquake]).
Please accept our condolences on the enormity of the tragedy that you are in
the midst of. We’d like to help out in any way we can.
Marjorie Greene
Special Projects Manager
EERI
499 14th St., Suite 320
Oakland, CA 94612
www.eeri.org