How earthquake-proof are NYC’s high-rises and new buildings?
on Friday didn’t cause systemic damage, it left many residents wondering how the city’s buildings would fare under stronger seismic waves.
Cowley said newer buildings are much lighter and must adhere to building design codes requiring them to have a “seismic gap,” or a certain amount of distance from other neighboring buildings. “Like a tree, you want your tree to sway and not hit another tree to impart force on each other. You want it to just sway in the wind and dissipate the energy naturally,” he said. “You should be more concerned if your building is not swaying because then you're not dissipating the force, especially when you're in a high-rise, it has to sway to relieve the forces and perform as designed. Nothing can be rigid and that tall.
But most of New York City’s nearly 1 million buildings were built between the mid-1800s and 1930s, before design codes were amended to account for seismic activity. “Your biggest worry would be maybe some step cracks in the facade of a building, maybe some broken or ornate things,” he said. “The brittle sections on a prewar building would be the things that are brittle to begin with: terracotta, cornices, that kind of stuff.”
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