How seismic waves affect human structures

The textbook reading this week spent considerable time discussing how seismic waves affect human structures.  In this discussion assignment, I want you all to become Earthquake Engineers for a day.

Your assignment this week, is to find what you think is this most well built and most poorly built, in regards to earthquake safety, pieces of furniture in your house.  This is not asking which piece of funiture will survive in an earthquake!  What this is asking is if a building was built like your piece of furniture, how would it fair in an earthquake.  I would like you to analyze furniture in your house as if it were a building. You must photograph each piece and submit it with your discussion.  You must critique each piece and state why you believe each one is the built the best and worse.  And, for the worse piece, you must describe strategies an engineer could use to make the furniture more stable during an earthquake if it were a large building.

Possible failures include pancaking of floors, collapse due to poor support of walls, too narrow to height ratio, poor construction material, ect.

I hope to see people coming up with really cool engineering mitigation strategies like adding supports, adding foundation strength, widening bases, ect.  There are some really neat ways engineers have tried to stabilize buildings from putting large water tanks in the tops to rollers in foundations.  Take a look at what’s out there and at what your peers are doing.

How seismic waves affect human structures