Building Damage around Bam Seismological Observatory Following the Bam, Iran Earthquake of Dec. 26, 2003

The post-earthquake investigations of the Bam, Iran earthquake of Dec. 26, 2003 were conducted by the Joint Reconnaissance Team of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Japan Association for Earthquake Engineering (JAEE), the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) and the Japan Society for Civil Engineers (JSCE) in collaboration with the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES) from Feb. 23 2004 to Mar. 4 2004. This paper reports the results of a damage evaluation of buildings around the Bam Seismological Observatory operated by the Building and Housing Research Center (BHRC). The results show that many residential houses in the investigated area were seismically vulnerable structures such as adobe and simple masonry structures. Poor construction quality was also found in some of the investigated buildings designed according to the current Iranian seismic code. Moreover, a good correlation between wall area ratio and damage levels was observed. Therefore, wall area ratio may be applicable for evaluating seismic capacity and screening retrofit candidates