- Author
- Lew, H. S.
- Title
- Overview of Damage to Highway Bridges During the Loma Prieta Earthquake.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- U.S./Japan Workshop on Seismic Retrofit of Bridges, 1st Proceedings. December 17-18, 1990, Gaithersburg, MD, Kawashima, K.; Priestley, M. J. N., Editors, 111-139 p., 1990
- Keywords
- earthquakes | damage | highways | bridges (structures)
- Identifiers
- Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco, California, October 17, 1989
- Abstract
- At 5:04 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time, on October 17, 1989, an earthquake with a surface-wave magnitude of 7.1 occurred with its epicenter located about 10 miles (15 km) northeast of Santa Cruz and 60 miles (95 km) south-southeast of San Francisco, California. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake ruptured a segment of the San Andreas fault below the Santa Cruz Mountains. The hypocenter was about 11 miles (18 km) beneath the Earth's surface, and the rupture propagated about 25 miles (40 km) both northwest and southeast within a lo-second period. The earthquake was felt over an area of 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 sq km), from Los Angeles to the south, Oregon to the north, and western Nevada to the east. This earthquake, named the Loma Prieta earthquake was the largest on the San Andreas fault since the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (M = 8.3) when a 275-mile (440-km) stretch of the fault ruptured. This report presents an overview of damage to highway bridge structures during the earthquake.