Anoop Randhawa

Strip the City - San Francisco

Name of Structure Modifications/Seismic Mitigation

Transamerica Pyramid ● It’s skin made out of almost 4000

glass windows and thousands of
tons of concrete and crushed cords
● Monitoring devices throughout the
building
● Its pyramid shape gives low centre
gravity which keeps it stable
● A steel trust wraps around the base
to help with stability (gives additional
bracing)
● It has a 30,000 ton concrete and
steel anchor
● The frame of the building zig zags, it
has a steel skeleton
● Safety Feature (not modification):
Elevator shafts have a seismic
switch - if an earthquake happened
the elevator would stop, go to the
nearest level, and open the doors
● Concrete floors also help

Golden Gate Bridge ● Its deep foundation goes as deep as

the bedrock (which is solid rock)
● 150,000 tons of concrete lock the
towers into the ground
○ These bases surround the
foundation
● There are 2 main cables that hold
the bridge (each cable is actually
made up of a series of cables) - it is
enough cable to circle the globe 3
times
○ These cables are made out
of steel wire
● (This is not part of the modifications)
A device called a creepmeter tells
how much tension is building up in
the fault - it basically measures how
much the cable has been pulled

Oakland Bay Bridge ● Oakland bay bridge is the busiest

bridge in USA
● This is the bridge that didn’t survive
the 1989 earthquake in San
Francisco
○ It was too rigid to absorb the
earthquake
○ The bolts of the bridge just
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came out
● A brand new bay bridge is going up
right next to the old one
● But lessons have been learned,
engineers now understand that you
need to learn how to work with
mother nature (the earthquake)
○ In the past, engineers
thought that you need to
make the bridge strong
○ But, now they understand
that bridge should be able to
dance when mother nature
dances
● Almost everything about this new
bridge is designed to be flexible
● A huge steel cable is attached to the
main part of the bridge so that it can
swing/sway freely
● The central tower has 4 steel pylons
that move independently (adds
flexibility)
○ There are beams between
the pylons that will crumble
to stop the tower from
collapsing (the beams take
the force and displace it)
● The roadways is split into 28
sections so it can stretch without
breaking
● Hidden inside the road bridge are
these hollow beams that absorb the
energy of the earthquake to protect
the rest of the structure

Mission Bay Residential Homes ● Mission Bay is reclaimed land - what

that means is that people have built
on an area that was once
underwater, they’re adding more
and more land to that
● So mission bay is no longer a bay
instead it has a layer of fill over it
○ It’s a mixture of rock, soil,
and debris
○ The problem is that they
didn’t properly place it back
then so now it’s in a poor
condition for support of
buildings
● Below the fill is the bay mud - a
weak clay
○ It’s not good for foundation
support
○ If there was an earthquake
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the bay mud could be very

dangerous - it could result
into the ​liquefaction​ of the
fill
■ The houses on top
can sink and collapse
into the ground
● You have to first build extremely
deep foundation
● Then they weld steel beams
together to make long foundation
pilings
● They hammer these pilings down
until they hit bedrock
○ These long pilings are driven
down in clusters
● Then they cap each cluster with
concrete so that you have more
surface area
● Then they connect the caps with a
grid work of concrete beams
● Finally they put a concrete mat on
top
● All of this could stop a 5-story
building from sinking
● This is a process that is very
expensive but is worth it

Subways/Tunnels (Caldecott Tunnel) ● Moving people/goods over the hills

has always been a challenge in San
Francisco
● The first solution was the cable
car/tram
○ It can work on even some of
the steepest streets without
slowing down
● The secret lies under the road
○ Inside a concrete tunnel, a
steel cable moves
○ A powerful clamp attaches
the cable to the car
○ This system even works
when two cables cross
■ The driver releases
his cable before the
collision and then the
driver picks it up
again on the other
side
● But the mega earthquake in 1906
destroyed this network
● Today instead of going over the
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hills, engineers drill right through

them
● But, tunnels under san francisco
must be able to cope with
earthquakes
● Something that is good for a tunnel
is to have some level of flexibility so
that when the ground moves around
it, the function of the tunnel is not
compromised
○ Instead of building one long
tunnel, they build it in
segments
○ A tunnel drilling machine
digs out the tunnel tube and
lines it with concrete
modules
■ They’re coated in
rubber so that they
can move against
each other
○ This allows the whole tunnel
tube to flex so that it doesn’t
break when the ground
around it moves
● Their biggest project is the central
subway
○ The most difficult part of this
project is building a train
station under chinatown (one
of the most densely
populated areas)
● The team will use the tunnels as the
starting point of their station
○ They’ll fill one section with
concrete
■ This will help the
diggers with carving
out a huge station
cavern
● Then the team will line the walls with
steel mesh and spray quick-drying
concrete over it
● Finally, they’ll install the platforms &
tracks
● The flexible tunnels & stations
should be able to withstand an
earthquake
● The safest place to be during an
earthquake is in an underground
tunnel because underground
everything moves less compared to
if you’re on top of the ground
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Dams, reservoirs, water pipes (aftermath of ● What follows after an earthquake is

earthquakes = fires) even more dangerous - fires (from
broken gas lines)
● The firefighter crew trains frequently
so that they are prepared
● After an earthquake, the firefighters
will need millions of litres of water
○ Unfortunately, san francisco
is a surprisingly dry place
■ The city is
surrounded by water,
but there are no
rivers that flow
through the centre
● One of the few sources of
freshwater is the san mateo creek
(which runs right along the san
andreas fault)
● Engineers took some extreme
measures to collect more freshwater
for the city - they built a dam (crystal
springs dam) right into the fault
○ This turned the small creek
into a huge reservoir
● When it was built in 1888 it was the
largest concrete dam in the world
with an amazing earthquake proof
design
○ Under its skin, there’s a
mosaic of huge interlocking
blocks - during an
earthquake, these blocks
can move which allows the
dam to flex without breaking
■ This design has kept
the dam intact for
over 120 years - it
even survived the
1906 earthquake (the
biggest quake that
every hit the west
coast)
● But the water pipes which carry the
water into the city didn’t survive
○ Because of this there was
not water at the water
hydrants to put out the fires
■ Fires destroyed ⅔ of
the city
● Engineers made sure that such a
tragedy would never happen again
○ They built a unique water
supply into the city itself
● It starts at the twin peaks
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○ They built a huge reservoir

here (this is reserved for
firefighting and designed to
survive earthquakes)
● Engineers made a pool deep into
the hill and lined it with reinforced
concrete slabs (each 20cm thick)
● Joints between the slabs allow the
pool to warp without cracking
● The reservoir can store over 40
million litres of water
● Gravity pulls this water downhill into
a network of pipes built under the
city which connect to 1500 hydrants
○ 240 km of earthquake-proof
high pressure pipes hidden
under the streets keep the
1500 hydrants from running
dry

Extra Information: Parkfield (Detecting ● Predicting when earthquakes will hit

Earthquakes) is the ultimate challenge
○ The answer may lie 300 km
south of san francisco
● The town of Parkfield has only 18
civilians but more earthquakes than
anywhere on san andreas fault
○ Scientists here are trying to
look for some type of sign
that tell us that an
earthquake is about to strike
● There’s a patch on san andreas
about the size of a soccer field and it
has recurring micro-earthquakes
(ex. magnitude 1) - they all reoccur
on that patch
● Geologists wanted to to get as close
as possible to this spot
○ So they drilled a hole 3km
down into the heart of the
san andreas
■ This mean that they
can put their
instruments right next
to the hyper-active
rupture zone
● A team of geo-physicists is installing
an ultra-sensitive microphone
○ They’re hoping it’ll survive
the grueling conditions at the
bottom (ex. Very hot)
■ They have to take a
lot of care to put
together the
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instrument
● The team drop sensor down to 1km
● Once in position, an arm clamps it to
the side of the hole
○ Then it starts listening for
changes in the earth’s crust
■ The scientists are
trying to find a unique
sound pattern just
before an earthquake
strikes
● Up top, they can now hear the hum
of rocks moving in the fault
○ The scientists hope that by
studying micro-earthquakes
they’ll know a lot more about
large earthquakes
● They sit alongside a network of 60
GPS motion sensors which are
along the san andreas fault
● They can’t predict the earthquakes
but they can detect them early on
and then try to outrun them
○ Speed of light is much faster
than the speed of the
earthquake waves so when
they have a major event they
can send an electronic signal
out to shut down generators,
power plants, gas pumping
stations, etc.
● But this experiment is still in its early
stages

*Liquefaction*​ - the force of an earthquake is so powerful that it transforms solid land into
things like quicksand (liquid)