The powerful earthquake simulations that UC San Diego conducted on a five-story building in spring 2012 — one of the largest seismic tests in U.S. history — caused fire and smoke to spread in ways that could have prevented people from escaping if the temblor were real, according to a review of the testing.
The experiment reaffirmed that fire can be a deadly force after a quake, and it gave scientists an unusually vivid look at how smoke can spread throughout areas such as elevators, staircases and exits.
“The upshot is that the combination of damage from the shaking and the resulting spread of fire and smoke leads to a higher potential loss of life,” said Brian Meacham, a researcher at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and one of the project’s lead investigators.
The University of California San Diego collaborated with other schools and agencies in designing and building a 75-foot-tall, 1.4 million-pound structure that was placed on an outdoor shake table at a test site that the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering operates in Scripps Ranch. The building was outfitted with the kind of elevator, ventilation and fire protection systems found in modern structures. Part of the tower also was turned into a mock hospital, featuring a medical suite and an intensive-care unit.
The tower was then subjected to shaking that replicated a range of earthquakes, from the magnitude-6.7 Northridge quake in 1994, which killed about 60 people, to the 7.9 Denali quake in 2002.
GARY ROBBINS • U-T