FAULT MOVEMENT AND ITS IMPACT ON GROUND DEFORMATIONS AND ENGINEERING STRUCTURES

In many regions around the world, engineering structures such as earth dams, buildings, pipelines, landfills, bridges, roads and railroads a re often built in areas very close to strike-slip fault segments. For the safe design of these structures, earthquake and geotechnical engin eers need a reliable estimate of the ground deformations that fault mo vements will induce at the sites of the proposed structures. The estim ation of the vertical ground deformations associated with the movement of strike-slip fault segments is the focus of this proposed study. Th ese vertical ground deformations are the result of stresses concentrat ed by the ends of active fault segments. In this study, the stresses a nd the resulting tri-dimensional vertical ground deformations that dev elop around moving fault segments were obtained using linear elastic f racture mechanics theory. The theoretical analysis was used to estimat e the amount of vertical deformation experienced by the ground surroun ding a strike-slip fault segment in China that mobilized during the 19 70 Tonghai earthquake. The calculated vertical deformations and the on es measured in the field compared well.