Earthquake mitigation laws, contributes to the development of seismic hazards studies in Peru

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Earthquake mitigation laws, contributes to the development of seismic hazards studies in Peru
Osmar Charca and Carlos Gamarra, from the research area, together with Denys Parra, General Manager of Anddes Peru, carried out the study called “Selection of Subduction Seismic Attenuation Laws for the Evaluation of Seismic Hazard in Peru”. The study has been qualified and authorized by CONCYTEC (National Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation) as a scientific research project under Law No. 30309 that grants a tax benefit applicable to expenses in R&D projects. i. The aforementioned project reduces uncertainty when estimating the seismic demand to which an engineering project such as earth dams, leaching pads, waste dumps, bridges, among others, will be subjected. In addition, it avoids the overestimation of design accelerations and the consequent increase in project costs. Therefore, the study benefits the engineering design sector to a greater extent, since it allows a better understanding of the design accelerations to which engineering structures could be exposed in their useful life. Likewise, it is important to mention that the project manages to contribute to disaster mitigation in Peru, since it identifies with less uncertainty the regions that are most exposed to seismic activity. About the R + D + i project: Currently, seismic hazard assessment has become one of the most important tools for disaster mitigation, since through this assessment it is possible to estimate seismic demand in terms of spectral accelerations, at which engineering structures could be exposed by the occurrence of earthquakes in a certain window of time and with a probability of exceedance. Due to the limited performance of attenuation laws derived from local data and the great impact of attenuation laws in the evaluation of seismic hazard, it has become common practice in Peru to adopt attenuation laws from other regions such as Japan, Nueva Zealand, Chile, among others. However, to date, there is no scientific-technical support on which mitigation law in the literature is the most appropriate for use in Peru. Many times, this problem is approached in a very subjective and not very transparent way, so there may be great divergences between the criteria adopted to select a certain attenuation law between one specialist or another. In order to address this problem, this project investigated the applicability of foreign mitigation laws derived from global and regional data to the subduction zone of Peru. For this purpose, the accelerations predicted by the attenuation laws and the accelerations observed in 485 seismic records associated with 118 subduction earthquakes that occurred in Peru and northern Chile, between 1966 and 2015 with magnitudes that vary between 5.0 and 8.4 were compared. MW. To access the R + D + i project: An article was presented at the XX National Congress of Civil Engineering (CONIC), Lima – 2018. To access this: See link. Next presentation of the study The abstract has been accepted for the presentation of an article at the XVI Pan American Congress of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, Cancun Mx – 2019, where results of the applicability of recently published attenuation laws to the subduction zone will be included. from Peru. XVI Pan American 2019. http://panamerican2019mexico.com/