Effectiveness of structural walls in improving the serviceability of a seismically-retrofitted RC building

A moderate earthquake with a magnitude Mw of 6.8 hit the Elazig Province of Turkey on January 24th, 2020, causing fatalities and structural damage/failure. Following the earthquake, a field reconnaissance was conducted at the Administration and Operation Campus of Karakaya Dam, which is 19 km from the earthquake epicenter. The exhibited performances in two side-by-side nominally identical reinforced concrete (RC) buildings with the same material properties and soil conditions differed significantly. The main reason lies in the preventive action taken before the earthquake in one of the buildings. The building retrofitted with additional structural walls had a slight/no damage level. However, the non-retrofitted building suffered severe damage due to large cracks in numerous infill walls, some of which were exposed to partial collapse. That makes the non-retrofitted building unserviceable, requiring evacuation after the earthquake. The field-observed building damage was compared with the seismic performances acquired from their refined numerical models for the recorded ground motions. The photographic documentation exposing the entire performance and damage level in non-retrofitted and retrofitted buildings was quantified by static pushover and nonlinear response history analyses. The post-earthquake performance of nonstructural members in retrofitted and non-retrofitted buildings was simulated with reasonable accuracy.