Days after the 4 August 2020 massive explosion at the port of Beirut in Lebanon, researchers were on the ground mapping the impacts of the explosion in the port and surrounding city. The goal was to document and preserve data on structural and facade damage before rebuilding.
The goal was to document and preserve data on structural and facade damage before rebuilding, said University of California, Los Angeles civil and environmental engineer Jonathan Stewart, who spoke about the effort at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2021 Annual Meeting.
The effort also provided an opportunity to compare NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory satellite surveys of the blast effects with data collected from the ground surveys. Stewart and his colleagues concluded that satellite-based Damage Proxy Maps were effective at identifying severely damaged buildings and undamaged buildings, but were less effective for assessing intermediate levels of structural or facade damage.
«The main take away is that the Damage Proxy Maps can definitely distinguish severe damage from lack of damage» for both structural and facade assessments, Stewart said, «but they are not as good at finer tuning.»
«If what you’re interested in is a fairly detailed picture of what has happened, it’s not able to replace a person who actually knows what they’re doing looking at the structure, particularly from the inside,» he added.
The reconnaissance of the Beirut blast was organized through the National Science Foundation-sponsored Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association (GEER). In addition to Stewart and his colleagues at the American University of Beirut, the team included members from the University of Illinois and the University of Calabria in Italy. The information analyzed by the GEER team can help engineers learn more about how to build safely against similarly destructive events, including earthquakes, in the future.
Story Source: Materials provided by Seismological Society of America. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.