This project involves a comparative analysis of damage to public property caused by the Loma Prieta and Whittier earthquakes. Specific objectives of the study are: (1) to collect a detailed listing of physical damage to public facilities including public buildings, streets, bridges and water sewer systems and document repair and replacement costs for each class of damage; (2) to produce one way descriptive statistics that show the overall damage pattern and the damage pattern for each jurisdiction; (3) to compare the distribution of damage across types of facilities with that experienced in the Whittier Narrows earthquake and test the hypothesis that the proportion of damages for each class is the same; (4) to calculate damage ratios for various systems based on the actual losses and secondary data on the amount and value of property in each case study jurisdiction; and (5) to compare the actual damage experienced in both Whittier Narrows and the Loma Prieta earthquakes to the damage predicted by the ATC-13 damage estimation method and determine the variation of each to the predicted values.
