Shaking a house down

Engineer Andre Filiatrault expects a major earthquake in Buffalo on Tuesday morning—a temblor as powerful as the 1994 earthquake that caused $40 billion in damage in Los Angeles.

Engineer Andre Filiatrault expects a major earthquake in Buffalo on Tuesday morning—a temblor as powerful as the 1994 earthquake that caused $40 billion in damage in Los Angeles. He hopes his stucco town house can withstand the shock.

In the performance art of earthquake engineering, Filiatrault and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo plan to subject an entire house to a magnitude-6.7 earthquake for a systematic assessment of how a typical wooden suburban home holds up to the rigours of life along the fault line.

The furnished 1,800-sq-ft three-bedroom, two-bath home—complete with a sedan in its two-car garage and crash dummies lounging in the living room—will be subjected to the most violent shaking possible in a US laboratory. Built to California construction code, the building is the largest wooden structure ever tested in a simulated earthquake, the engineers said.

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The $1.24 million test is part of a four-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop better construction techniques for wooden homes in active seismic zones. “It is straight from the streets of LA,’’ said civil engineering professor John van de Lindt of Colorado State University, who is overseeing the experiment. “It is quite a feat to get the thing moving. The furniture will fly. It will be almost too realistic.’’

The sudden swaying and vibrations will simulate the intensities recorded in the Northridge event, replayed in Buffalo like a set of seismic greatest hits. The town house, bolted to a concrete slab as it would be in California, was built on the test site by a construction crew from California. The shaking will be provided by two powerful hydraulically driven tables, in place of the mammoth grinding crustal plates that generate Southern California’s tremors.

The tables are programmed to reproduce the ground shaking that occurred in the San Fernando Valley at 4:30 am on January 17, 1994. Preliminary experiments reproduced the ground motion recorded that day.

—Los Angeles Times / Robert Lee Hotz