US and Japanese Researchers Hold Eighth Cooperative Workshop on Liquefaction and Lifeline Facilities

Tokyo, Japan was the setting of the 8th US-Japan Workshop on Earthquake Resistant Design of Lifeline Facilities and Countermeasures Against Liquefaction held on December 16-18, 2002. The workshop was attended by over 25 U.S. and 70 Japanese participants. It was sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Technology; National Science Foundation and MCEER. Professors J.P. Bardet, University of Southern California, M. Hamada, Waseda University, and T.D. O’Rourke, Cornell University, served jointly as co-chairs of the event.

There were over 50 presentations and papers prepared for the workshop. Topics covered included pipeline response and design for permanent ground deformation, rehabilitation of lifelines, liquefaction hazard mapping, fault rupture effects on structures, seismic performance of lifelines, characteristics of liquefiable soils, pile behavior in liquefied ground and ground motion characteristics at sites subject to liquefaction. There was also a special session on the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), with short presentations by many recipients of Phase I and II NEES awards. The proceedings of the workshop will be published by MCEER later this year.

The workshop series began in 1988, and since that time, has served as a major instrument for collaboration and cooperative exchange. Cooperative research between Japanese and U.S. earthquake engineers has resulted in significant new findings about liquefaction and its effects on lifeline facilities, assessment of liquefaction potential, modeling of liquefaction-induced large ground displacements, performance of lifeline facilities and foundations, dynamic response of underground structures, and countermeasures and earthquake resistant design against liquefaction.