Degenkolb team 2 in Chile
Degenkolb Chile Team 2 left the US from 4 different cities on Tuesday March 16 – Stacy Bartoletti from Seattle, Kent Yu from Portland, Daniel Zepeda from LA, and Mike Braund from San Diego. We all met up in Atlanta and flew from Atlanta to Santiago and then from Santiago to Concepcion. The travel was generally uneventful with the exception of very short connection times. 3 of the 4 of us ended up running through the airport in Atlanta to catch our flight and we all ran through the airport in Santiago to catch our plane that was held just for us to Concepcion.
Upon arrival in Concepcion we were met by our tour guide Chris and a film crew from Vancouver BC developing a documentary for the Discovery Channel Canada. Mark Mills the producer and Kevin Mills spent the day with Degenkolb Team 2 and Mark Pierepiekarz from Seattle looking at the earthquake impacts in downtown Concepcion. It was a very productive day. We started the day by getting onto the roof of a 16 story apartment building. This allowed us a bird’s eye view of all of Concepcion and started the day with incredible hospitality from the people of Chile. We had no reason to be allowed access to the roof of this particular building other than we asked and building manager gave us a personal tour and also dug out drawings of his building for us to review.
Roof Top Photographs 1 and 2.
Following our roof top view we visited the now famous Alto Rio building that collapsed at the first story and toppled completely over. We spent significant time at this site and were able to gain access to the building by a professor from Chile that Daniel met. There will be much to learn from this collapse as more details become public but it appeared to us that it had discontinuous shear walls on the east side of the building that failed and caused it to completely overturn in one direction.
After the Alto Rio Building we looked at several other buildings including a new 25 story concrete shear wall apartment or condominium building that had severe damage to a couple of shear walls at the boundary elements. It appears as though typical construction of shear walls in Chile does not include any special confinement steel at the boundary elements. We also progressed to the also soon to be famous O Higgins Building. This is also approximately a 22 to 23 story building that is a total loss due to structural damage to exterior concrete shear walls and partial floor collapse. The building appeared to have torsional irregularities at the upper levels and higher mode effects. It was also very interesting to note the large amount of debris that fell from the building right over the main entrance. This building was completed in 2009 and was not yet fully leased as office space.
One final observation from day 1 was the large amount of damage to new and very modern buildings in Concepcion. Several new buildings that were not even fully occupied performed very poorly while others performed very well. It is not yet apparent why there was such a discrepancy in performance but it is clear that the impacts of the earthquake and inability to recover in a quick manner would have been much greater if these buildings were fully occupied. Where would all of these tenants have gone and how would the community be resilient without their support in recovery?
