Earthquake damage detection in the Imperial County Services Building I: The data and time–frequency analysis

The former Imperial County Services Building was a six-story reinforced concrete structure in the El Centro, California, severely damaged by the 1979 Imperial Valley earthquake. It represents a rare case of an instrumented building that has been damaged, and thus can serve as a full-scale benchmark to evaluate and further develop structural health monitoring methods. This paper presents an analysis of inter-story drifts, and of changes in the first NS and EW system frequencies (estimated from the ridge of the Gabor transform of the relative roof displacement response) as indicators of the occurrence of damage. The detected initial decreases of system frequency, of about 28% for NS and 24% for EW motions, are not believed to be due to severe damage. The subsequent decreases, of about 44% for NS and 21% for EW motions, are attributed to damage. Near the end of shaking, increases of about 35% for the NS and 36% for EW motions were detected. (These percentage changes were computed with respect to the previous value for particular interval, rather than a fixed reference). During the most severe shaking, the inter-story drifts exceeded 0.5% for NS and 1.5% for EW motions.