Trial of damage evaluation by Indian ocean tsunami in patong beach of Thailand

Abstract

A huge tsunami caused by the giant earthquake occurred off Sumatra in Indonesia, on 26th December 2004, attacked the coastal regions of many countries facing the Indian Ocean. This paper describes evaluation methods of structural damage in order to mitigate the damage by huge tsunamis. First, the damage by this tsunami at Patong Beach in Phuket province of Thailand is explained. Next, diagrams to get critical inundation heights which break buildings are shown by using a rigid frame model as functions of inundation heights. Then, how to get the inundation height empirically is explained. Moreover, a numerical model to simulate the inundation height is also used, because the method described previously will give inundation heights of low accuracy as geographical feature becomes complicated. Furthermore, there were some structural collapses (a masonry wall and so on) by tsunami back-flow; the stability of a concrete wall against the back-flow is also discussed. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company and Japan Society of Civil Engineers.