El Salvador is an earthquake prone country because it lies between two tectonic plates, the Cocos plate and the Caribbean plate. Even though several major earthquakes have struck the country, there are no methodologies to evaluate buildings after an earthquake, and the current methodology, which was proposed after the 1986 earthquake, has been used since 1989. Therefore, it is important to propose a new methodology of evaluation of damages in buildings, considering the detailed evaluation and the engineering evaluation of structures. To achieve this, the Salvadorian Guideline for post-earthquake seismic evaluation was reviewed in this research.
In order to propose a new methodology for post-earthquake evaluation of structures, guidelines and recommendations of Japanese guidelines (JBDPA and AIJ) and US guidelines (FEMA 306) were reviewed. The Japanese guidelines provide provisions for post-earthquake evaluation of reinforced concrete members, however there are no provisions for reinforced masonry components, which is why for this type of elements the FEMA 306 guidelines were used. Therefore, the main topics to take into consideration for improving the damage evaluation were the damage classification of the structure, the quantification of seismic capacity and the reduction of the seismic capacity after an earthquake.
To evaluate the methodology in this study a building was analyzed using the proposed methodology and applying the proposed reduction factors in order to quantify the reduction of the seismic capacity of the structure after the 2001 earthquake.