Watch it sway: 10-story tower survives fake quake in possible boon for tall wood buildings

A 10-story tower mostly made of wood withstood a simulated 7.7 earthquake on UC San Diego’s outdoor shake table Tuesday, underscoring a belief by some engineers that such structures could safely be used as homes and offices in areas near big faults.

Engineers said it didn’t appear that the building suffered structural damage during the shaking, which roughly replicated a quake that killed more than 2,400 people and destroyed upward of 10,000 buildings in Taiwan in 1999.

The tower is the tallest full-scale building ever to undergo a simulated quake of that size. The test was preceded by shaking that simulated Southern California’s 6.7 Northridge quake, which killed nearly 60 people and caused property damage of as much as $13 billion in 1994.

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The experiment was led by the Colorado School of Mines, one of the many institutions from around the world that use UCSD’s shake table in Scripps Ranch.

“The building performed exactly like we expected,� said Shiling Pei, a CSM engineer and the project’s co-director. “The building should go back to plumb. We designed everything to be elastic like a spring or a rubber band. You can stretch it, but it will come back.�

He estimated that the top of the building moved 1 to 2 feet on each side during peak shaking.

The test building is primarily made of cross-laminated timber along with steel. It differs from traditional tall buildings, which are mostly steel and concrete.

Pei and other engineers see timber buildings as a viable alternative because wood is a strong, sustainable, affordable material that can be pre-fabricated in factories.