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An earthquake shelter for everyone
My wife and I live on the 5th floor in Kathmandu. It's relatively safe but regardless of how strong a building is, what people need to understand is the concept of performance based design. A building is never "earthquake resistant" as much as we like to make things black and white. Buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes of certain intensities. For example, hospitals and schools are designed to be safe against much more severe earthquakes than say a warehouse. But no building is safe against all earthquakes - they're just safe against earthquakes they're designed for. There's always a possibility that there will be an earthquake stronger than what it's designed for. It then becomes a probability question = performance based design.
Now that we've got the discussion of whether buildings in Kathmandu are earthquake safe out of the way, lets move on to the scenario that an earthquake hits that is stronger than what your building can withstand. What do you do? If you live in a shed then you laugh and sip some tea. If you live on the 5th floor like us? You're toast since you don't have enough time to run all the way down before your building collapses.
The only other thing you can do is to get shelter. You know, the usual. Hide under a desk and hope no debris fall on you and crush your family to death. So if I'm going to hide under something I want that something to be strong as hell. Hence my idea of an earthquake wedge shelter. Think of it as a shark cage but with padding inside so you don't crack your head open on the way down when your building crumbles (and a lot of buildings in Kathmandu will crumble). If people can go over the Niagara falls in a barrel and survive then so can I. I'll post drawings and pictures soon but my general idea is to have a wedge inside another steel wedge. The inside wedge will attached to the outside wedge with dampers and springs (think motorcycle shocks) and be padded and full of medical supplies and water. I want to be one of those people that people talk about on TV where rescuers give up for dead but find alive a month later in our shelter.
Now that we've got the discussion of whether buildings in Kathmandu are earthquake safe out of the way, lets move on to the scenario that an earthquake hits that is stronger than what your building can withstand. What do you do? If you live in a shed then you laugh and sip some tea. If you live on the 5th floor like us? You're toast since you don't have enough time to run all the way down before your building collapses.
The only other thing you can do is to get shelter. You know, the usual. Hide under a desk and hope no debris fall on you and crush your family to death. So if I'm going to hide under something I want that something to be strong as hell. Hence my idea of an earthquake wedge shelter. Think of it as a shark cage but with padding inside so you don't crack your head open on the way down when your building crumbles (and a lot of buildings in Kathmandu will crumble). If people can go over the Niagara falls in a barrel and survive then so can I. I'll post drawings and pictures soon but my general idea is to have a wedge inside another steel wedge. The inside wedge will attached to the outside wedge with dampers and springs (think motorcycle shocks) and be padded and full of medical supplies and water. I want to be one of those people that people talk about on TV where rescuers give up for dead but find alive a month later in our shelter.
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2.
Bikalpa Paudel
^ These things work only once, so that would be best kept for the actual situation (which I hope never arrives).
PS: That would be a pain to accomodate unless you dedicate a full room for it. And don't forget to put a few packets f Wai Wai. :D
Good thought, let me know when you are done designing the cage. Are you planning to test your cage using some kind of realistic method too? Also put detail design structure as well as pictures too.
11 months ago