INELASTIC ANALYSIS OF THE IMPERIAL COUNTY SERVICES BUILDING.

Abstract

On the 15 October 1979, this building suffered major structural damage in a powerful earthquake. This paper briefly describes the building and the damage that occurred, before discussing the computer models that were analyzed to study the likely inelastic behavior of the building. Though the analytical time histories do not show very good agreement with the seismograph results, they do show that the transverse component of the earthquake had a significant effect on the behavior of the building on account of a non-symmetric arrangement of the ground floor shear walls in the transverse direction. Another factor was the placing of a ground level slab above the detailed column hinges.