THE ROLE OF SOIL BEHAVIOR ON DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE DINAR-EARTHQUAKE (SOUTHWESTERN TURKEY) OF OCTOBER 1, 1995

The Dinar earthquake (M-L = 6.0) took place in southwestern Turkey on October 1, 1995, and caused extensive damage to buildings in the city of Dinar, Soil liquefaction and lateral-spreading types of ground fail ure developed in the vicinity of Dinar, In order to investigate the po ssible contribution to the damage to buildings by site amplification, both the practical method of calculating the natural period of soils a nd site response analyses were performed, Geotechnical data from boreh ole records, and hypothetically assigned shear wave velocities to the soil layers were combined into the computer model SHAKE91 to compute t he predominant period of the soil columns at four selected locations. The results of site response analyses indicate that the predominant pe riods of those locations are far beyond that of buildings in Dinar, Th us, it was concluded that the heavy damage to buildings associated wit h the recent earthquake is attributed largely to the use of improper m aterial and poor design, The relatively long duration of earthquake sh aking intensified the damage to the poorly constructed buildings.