A system to mitigate deep mine tremor effects in the design of civil infrastructure

• Seismic hazard from deep mining may be danger to buildings on the ground surface.
• Newly designed structures on the ground should be protected at the design stage.
• For this purpose Eurocode 8 is adapted using displacement approach.
• Site dependent design response spectrum is constructed.
• A methodology linking forecasted ground velocity and design acceleration is derived.

Deep mining may induce quakes reaching magnitude mL of 4.5 to 5.5 and leading to surface ground motion with Modified Mercalli intensities up to VIII. Such strong ground motions may cause serious damages in civil infrastructure in the vicinity of mines. However any adaptation of a classic seismic code in design faces an impending problem of differences in spectral content and duration between the surface records of the rockbursts and natural earthquakes, as well as in their different risk definitions. This paper presents a system to define design seismic load based on forecasted surface horizontal particle velocity from the rockbursts expected during the planned mining activities. Such forecasts are routinely prepared by the geophysical mine services. Respective seismic load may then be applied in the design of buildings and other structures to mitigate the rockburst induced seismic effects on them. For this purpose the European seismic code, Eurocode 8, is adapted.