EARTHQUAKE-PROOF BUILDINGS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27203, 21 November 1953, Page 5

EARTHQUAKE-PROOF BUILDINGS

MORE RESEARCH URGED IN N.Z. (New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, November 19. A great deal more research'should be done on the designing of earth-quake-proof buildings in a country so exposed to earthquake risk as New Zealand, said a former Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (Mr E. R. Callaghan) today, when moving a vote of thanks at a meeting of the Wellington Catholic Mens Luncheon Club to Mr V. A. Murphy, assistant designing engineer to the New Zealand Railways, for a lecture on New Zealand’s earthquake problem. Mr Murphy detailed the research work that was being done at the Dominion Physical Laboratory at Gracefield and how new seismographic instruments were being used to study the effects of earthquakes on holdings and other structures. The earthquake resistance of buildings was of importance to everyone in Wellington in particular, and to New Zealand generally. The strength of some Wellington buildings was not appropriate to their height, he said. “The newer buildings are quite good in their resistance to earthquakes, but the older ones we cannot vouch for,” Mr Murphy said. Any structure had a natural period of vibration. Any structure was like an inverted pendulum and the period of vibration was the time it took for the end of the pendulum to swing from one side to the other and back again.

“An earthquake has a selective faculty for picking out the buildings which have the particular period of vibration as itself and gives those buildings a terrific thrashing,” he said. From their research into earthquakes, New Zealand engineers were endeavouring to select a period of vibration for buildings which would avoid the period of vibration of most of our earthquakes, he said.