Unexpected soil amplification effect on seismic performance of highway bridges during the Aegean earthquake of October 2020, Mw 6.6

Abstract

On October 30, 2020, an earthquake about 70 km away from the city center of Izmir with a 4.3 million population has shaken the city tremendously and has resulted in destruction of many building type of structures due to an unexpected high soil-amplified vibrations very similar to the Mexico City earthquake in 1985. The bridges at the soil-amplified sites has performed in elastic range with no damage at all. In the city of Izmir, the 42 year old twin bridges located on the main transportation route, were tremendously shaken by the earthquake had observed to have no seismic induced damage. Surprisingly twin bridges suffering from the alkali silica reaction (ASR) over the years did not even pound to each other despite the small size of longitudinal gap between them. As it has been known, the past performance of Turkish designed bridges are typically succesfull with almost no damage as observed in the Van 2011 and Sivrice 2020 earthquake mainly due to allowing movements at their joints and to flexible type of framing. The focus of the paper is given to understand the successful performance of bridges and to investigate the non-pounded twin bridges of the Izmir city. In this scope, a bridge inspection has been performed and the twin bridges have been analyzed for the recorded ground motion. The results have indicated that the structures have been subjected to 0.3 g at their vibration modes and the twin bridges have a synchronized motion due to having the identical vibration mode shape with a period of 1.5 seconds