Earthquake induced damage estimation for steel buildings in Puerto Rico

This work presents a method for estimating the expected damage caused by an earthquake on steel buildings in Puerto Rico. Since Puerto Rico is located between a series of tectonic faults, buildings could suffer the damages caused by a major earthquake. The objective of this research is to develop the information needed for insurance companies to estimate the earthquake damage of steel buildings in a simple and practical way. Steel buildings typically found in Puerto Rico have been analyzed. The response of these buildings to many acceleration time histories have been recorded. With these recorded data, fragility curves which indicate the probability of a damage state to occur were created. A cost per square foot has been assigned to each damage state. This cost is then multiplied by the probability of damage for each damage state and the final expected cost for the total damage is obtained.