Best wishes for a productive Winter Quarter!

Cordially,

Lizabeth (Betsy) A. Wilson
Director of University Libraries

Starting in early March 2001, and continuing for approximately one year, the contractor will install seismic bracing in the 1963 building of Suzzallo (see diagram of Suzzallo on next page). The work will be done in groups of floors, as follows:

• Second and Fourth Floors, beginning March 2001
• First and Third Floors, beginning June 2001
• Sub-basement, Basement, Ground, and Fifth Floors, beginning September 2001

The construction areas on the first pair of floors, second and fourth, will be cleared during February, to meet the contractor's start date of March 7th. Most of the study furniture will be moved to storage, and some of the books will be moved temporarily to auxiliary stacks. During April and May, library staff will coordinate the clearing of the first and third floor construction zones. As soon as possible after the construction is completed on a particular floor, shelving will be re-erected around the new seismic bracing, and the books will be returned.

Some of the future construction spaces in the1963 building are occupied by library staff. Over 85 staff members must move to spaces in the Allen Library and temporary facilities at Sand Point.

The Allen Library bridge area lounge furniture will be stored temporarily at Sand Point so that heavy study carrels (removed from the temporary staff areas in Allen) can be relocated to the bridge areas for student use. (These particular carrels are too heavy to be moved out of the building.)

Suzzallo Library services will continue to operate despite the construction. Library staff will do everything possible to help students, faculty, staff, and visitors use the library and find books and journals. Signage on floors near the construction zones will indicate the temporary locations of books that have been moved. For books temporarily moved to auxiliary stacks, the online catalog will indicate this changed location; use the “request” button to order retrieval of the book. If you cannot find a book, go to the Circulation Desk, Ground Floor Suzzallo, for assistance.

Winter Quarter hours for Suzzallo and Allen Libraries have been shortened to allow for the noisiest construction work to be done late at night. The Suzzallo and Allen Libraries close at 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday evenings during Winter Quarter. Odegaard Undergraduate Library is open 24 hours Sundays through Thursdays

The last months of 2000 were busy with many aspects of Suzzallo renovation, the most significant being the completion of excavation for, and concrete pouring of, most of the new large footings underneath the 1925 and 1935 buildings. The largest single concrete pour was done on December 21st and required 61 cubic yards of concrete. This amount is equal to almost 250,000 lbs., or enough to build a 3' x 3' column 18 stories high.

Nuprecon excavated around the footings of the eight original steel columns of the 1925 "tower," now known as the Octagon area. This area will be the seismic center of the shear wall and brace frame work tying the four buildings (1925, 1935, 1947 and 1963) of Suzzallo together in a single seismic frame. The eight bell-shaped footings of the octagonal tower were strengthened and joined as part of the December 21st concrete pour, and soon the six story steel columns will be laced together with structural steel from bottom to top.

International Steel has also completed the floor knitting (joining together the various floor slabs of each building) in the Octagon area, and the complex structural bracing in the 1925 building attic.

The electrical contractors (Sequoyah) completely renovated the large electrical room in the 1963 basement. Emergency transformers and switches have been consolidated, new high voltage switchgear connected to existing utilities, and data communication conduits installed. In the 1925 building, Cosco Fire Protection has installed most of the mains and vertical supply risers; other subcontractors have installed ductwork and cable trays.

In late January, International Steel began strengthening the existing steel columns in the Suzzallo Reading Room, floor to attic. A structural steel "bat wing" strut will also be fabricated and is designed to seismically connect the 1925 building to the strengthened Octagon. The "bat wing" will be visible above the third floor as you leave the 1963 building, go through the Octagon area, and into the Suzzallo Reading Room.

The concrete shear walls in both the 1925 and 1935 buildings will soon be framed and poured. In the 1925 building, these supporting walls will extend from the ground floor to the underside of the third floor, just under Suzzallo Reading Room. In the 1935 building, shear walls will extend from basement to attic on both the east and west ends. A center shear wall, running north to south, will be poured from the basement to the underside of the third floor. New structural steel floor decks will be framed and poured so that all the floors in the 1935 building are at the same elevation.

The shotcrete method will be used to form the shear walls. In this process, compressed air forces liquid concrete through a nozzle onto a one-sided wall form. This method was originally used to seal excavations.

It is now used as an alternate method to place concrete and still achieve full bonding around steel reinforced walls, without voids or air pockets. In this case there will be a "sacrificial form" (made out of metal studs and sheetrock) to spray the concrete against and an air space will exist between the shear wall and exterior masonry. The brick masonry of Suzzallo has been found to be as much as 16" thick in some places.

Plaster ceilings in the west entrance of the 1925 building have been removed so that both interior and exterior stone arches can be braced with structural steel.

Once structural work is completed in the 1925 and 1935 mechanical rooms, large air handling units will be installed, probably in mid-March. A massive crane will be mobilized to lift the units over the roof and into place.

Conduit, piping, ductwork, cable trays and other infrastructures will be coordinated and installed on a floor by floor basis.

Make sure to visit the Suzzallo Renovation website to see construction photos: http://www.lib.washington.edu/about/ suzzren/construcphotos.html

by Wendy McDaniel, Natural Sciences Library

What does your library book and an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest have in common? At least one of them may be overdue!

Library shelves overturned as a result of the 1949 Olympia earthquake (1)

In Washington and Oregon there are three kinds of earthquakes: (2)

• Intraplate "Deep"
• Interface of Subduction Zone
• Crustal (North American Plate)

For earthquakes of the Subduction Zone kind, a magnitude 8.0-9.0 is expected every 300-500 years. The last event occurred about 300 years ago and could happen anywhere from the offshore deformation front to western Coast Range and Olympic Mountains.

For earthquakes of the Crustal kind, the 1872 North Cascades is the largest known and was a magnitude of approximately 7.5. The largest expected is less than 8.0, and there have been four known in the last 1000 years located from Vancouver Island to Seattle. The shaking effects are likely to last 20 to 60 seconds with many aftershocks of magnitude 6.5 or greater.

What is "g" you ask? It's the symbol for the constant of gravitation - the name given to that force of nature which manifests itself as a mutual attraction between masses, and whose mathematical expression was first given by Newton, in the law which states: "Any two particles of matter attract one another with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." (3)

Horizontal movement during earthquakes activates "shear forces," defined by Chambers Earth Sciences Dictionary as "a type of deformation in which parallel planes in a body remain parallel but are relatively displaced in a direction parallel to themselves; in fact there is a tendency for adjacent planes to slide over each other. A rectangle, if it is subjected to a shearing force parallel to one side, becomes a parallelogram." (4)

According to Bill Steele, UW Seismology Lab, widespread damage to older, poorly constructed buildings starts at 10% of G or less. 70% of G causes significant damage. The 1/28/95 5.0 Point Robinson, Maury Island (attached to Vashon Island) earthquake was 7% of G. The 5.3 Duvall earthquake on 5/2/96 was 20% of G and caused millions of dollars damage to electrical substations. The 5.8 Satsop earthquake on 7/2/99 damaged the cupola of the courthouse in Montesano; repairs were estimated to be as high as $500,000.

In a 1995 article published by Nelson, et al. (5), radiocarbon dating was done on fossils of plants suddenly buried alive and collected from areas along the rupture in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They concluded "that a single magnitude 9 earthquake, or a series of lesser earthquakes, ruptured most of the length of the Cascadia Subduction Zone between the late 1600's and early 1800's, and probably in the early 1700's."

In 1997 Brian Atwater and others (7) were able to narrow down the date of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake to a single growing season after 1699 and before 1700, by tree ring comparisons between trees killed by tidal submergence and live trees from locations along the rupture. This study also strengthened the fact that the Pacific Northwest is indeed subject to magnitude 9 earthquakes, by helping to confirm the length of the rupture which would produce the observed tsunami heights (2-3 meters) in Japan.

This type of subduction zone earthquake is estimated to occur every 500 years on average, and we are now just past its 301st;anniversary.

The Seattle Fault runs east-west from Lake Sammamish to Kitsap County south of I-90. Recently, evidence of surface rupture was found near Vasa Park in South Bellevue, two ruptures on Bainbridge Island, and another under Interstate 5 just south of the Interstate 90. Bill Steele warned that because of the Seattle fault, earthquake energy will be directed into Seattle and will be more violent for the same magnitude, more Kobe-like, and that the worst case scenario wasn't recognized as a concern when Suzzallo was built. The current building modifications to Suzzallo will not only improve life safety but allow for this historically significant building to be repaired after a major earthquake.

Slump along the shores of Greenlake, north of downtown Seattle. This 1949 earthquake induced ground failure occurred near the south end of the lake in an area that subsequently experienced ground failure during the April 29, 1965, earthquake. (8)

To see more pictures of damage from the 1949 earthquake, visit the Museum of History and Industry Online Photo Collection: http://www.seattlehistory.org/ and do a keyword search for "earthquake".

1. Noson, Linda Lawrance, Washington State Earthquake Hazards, Olympia, Wash. : Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources, Division of Geology and Earth Sciences, 1988 p.44

2. "Washington and Oregon Earthquake Summary" chart, Seismology Lab, Geophysics Program, University of Washington

3. Chambers earth sciences dictionary / general editor, P.M.B. Walker ; consultant editor, P.A. Sabine. Edinburgh : Chambers, 1991

4. ibid.

5. Nelson, A.R., et al. Nature 378:371-374 (1995)

6. Satake, K.,Shimazaki, K., Tsuiji, Y. & Ueda, K. Nature 379: 246-249 (1996)

7. Yamaguchi, D.K., Atwater, B.F., et al. Nature 389:922-923 (1997)

8. Assessing earthquake hazards and reducing risk in the Pacific Northwest / Albert M. Rogers ... [et al.], editors, Washington : U.S. G.P.O. ; Denver, CO : U.S. Geological Survey, Information Services, 1996. p.386