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Published March 1, 2019 | public
Journal Article

Lower Bounds on Ground Motion at Point Reyes during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake from Train Toppling Analysis

Abstract

Independent constraints on the ground motions experienced at Point Reyes station during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are obtained by analyzing the dynamic response of a train that overturned during the earthquake. The train is modeled as a rigid rectangular block for this study. From this analysis, we conclude that the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and peak ground velocity (PGV) at Point Reyes station would have been at least 4 m/s^2 and 0.5 m/s⁠, respectively. This lower bound is then used to perform simple checks on the synthetic ground‐motion simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It is also shown that the hypocenter of the earthquake should be located to the south of Point Reyes station for the overturning of the train to match an eyewitness description of the event.

Additional Information

© 2019 Seismological Society of America. Published Online 30 January 2019. Data and Resources: The time histories from the ground‐motion simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were downloaded from https://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/413/ (last accessed August 2014). The earthquake records used in this study were downloaded from the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) strong ground motion database (https://ngawest2.berkeley.edu/site, last accessed August 2014). The rigid‐body dynamics algorithm used for analyzing the train model is from chapter 2 of Veeraraghavan (2015). The pacific railroad map is from Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society's website available at http://www.nwprrhs.org/history.html (last accessed November 2018). The authors thank Brad Aagaard of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for pointing us toward the data from the ground‐motion simulations. They would also like to thank Klaus‐G. Hinzen, Rasool Anooshehpoor, and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful review, which significantly improved the article. This research project has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF Award EAR‐1247029), USGS, and Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023