Adobe, or mud brick, has been widely used as a building material in the American Southwest, including California. The vulnerability of many original adobe structures to damage or destruction from earthquakes has been of great concern. The guidelines presented here address the practical aspects of this problem and represent the culmination of 12 years of research and testing on the seismic retrofitting of adobe buildings. These guidelines can assist in the planning of seismic retrofitting projects consistent with both conservation principles and established public policy.

Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards presents a broad range of current approaches to measuring vulnerability. It provides a comprehensive overview of different concepts at the global, regional, national, and local levels, and explores various schools of thought. More than 40 distinguished academics and practitioners analyse quantitative and qualitative approaches, and examine their strengths and limitations. This book contains concrete experiences and examples from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to illustrate the theoretical analyses.The authors provide answers to some of the key questions on how to measure vulnerability and they draw attention to issues with insufficient coverage, such as the environmental and institutional dimensions of vulnerability and methods to combine different methodologies.This book is a unique compilation of state-of-the-art vulnerability assessment and is essential reading for academics, students, policy makers, practitioners, and anybody else interested in understanding the fundamentals of measuring vulnerability. It is a critical review that provides important conclusions which can serve as an orientation for future research towards more disaster resilient communities.

This book describes tests performed on model adobe buildings to evaluate seismic damage mitigation techniques applicable to the retrofitting of historic and culturally significant adobe structures. Part of the Getty Seismic Adobe Project (GSAP), the three-year program outlined in this volume was designed to develop and test minimally invasive, inexpensive, and easily implemented methods of protecting such structures from severe earthquake damage. Small- and large-scale models were tested on computer-controlled shaking tables at Stanford University and at the IIZIS Earthquake Engineering Laboratory in the Republic of Macedonia, respectively. The authors identify typical failure modes of adobe structures and describe specific retrofit techniques to help minimize such failures. Extensive photographic documentation is included.

The Deep Mixing Method (DMM), a deep in-situ soil stabilization technique using cement and/or lime as a stabilizing agent, was developed in Japan and in the Nordic countries independently in the 1970s. Numerous research efforts have been made in these areas investigating properties of treated soil, behavior of DMM improved ground under static and d