García-González, Rolando

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    Development of hurricane based fragility curves for wood-zinc houses in Puerto Rico
    (2007) García-González, Rolando; Saffar, Ali; College of Engineering; Acosta, Felipe J.; Godoy, Luis A.; López, Ricardo R.; Ramos, Ricardo; Department of Civil Engineering; Huérfano, Víctor
    The costliest natural disasters to strike Puerto Rico in the last century have been caused by tropical storms and hurricanes. Over the years, many attempts were made to reduce vulnerability by improving the infrastructures. The results have been mixed for what can be best described as lack of focus on areas needing the most attentions. Woodzinc houses are constructed using stud walls and a roof system formed by fastening corrugated, galvanized steel sheets, referred to as zinc, to wood spacers and rafters. In the aftermath of hurricane Georges, in 1998, nearly 5,000 houses were destroyed and more than 95,000 houses suffered extensive roof damage. The majority of the houses involved were wood-zinc houses. Consequence-based Risk Management, CRM, is a new multidisciplinary approach to multi-hazards risk reduction that was developed over the last decade by the researchers at the Mid-America Earthquake Center, MAE. In the CRM approach, a succession of processes and decisions are used to predict the consequences of a particular hazard, be it an earthquake, fire, flood, or a hurricane. The UPRM, being a member of MAE, was assigned the task of examining the portability of the CRM into a multi-hazards environment. The wood-zinc structures were selected as the best example to test the consequence minimization The purpose of this investigation is to select prototypes, quantify demand and resistance functions, and develop fragility curves for different classes of wood-zinc structures used in Puerto Rico. From historical records, the roof system and the roof-to wall connections have been the most vulnerable components for these structures. Other components considered are the wall systems, the wall sidings, and the openings. Full scale laboratory testing was used to model the roof systems based on a new dynamic load protocol. The structural systems tested varied from weak, W, to common, C1 and C2, to strong, S1 and S2, to ultimate, U. The S2 and U systems use zinc straps as a roof retrofitting measure. Different design and built configurations were also examined for roof-to-wall connections and wall systems. Simulations show substantial improvements in the performance of systems whenever high code standards are followed.