**Engineering**

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Mechanics 2012; 47(6): 679-687.

**Chapter 8**

**FE Based Vulnerability Assessment of Highway Bridges**

The assessment of seismic vulnerability in regions where the risk from earthquake shaking is considered moderate poses special problems in terms of establishing critical conditions for failure and the importance and urgency for taking action. Research studies sponsored at the University of Mississippi (UM) over a period of about 10 years by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) and Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT), respectively, have been aimed at identifying the vulnerability of select critical highway bridges

The historical occurrence of multiple but infrequent major seismic events in the NMSZ exceeding seismic moment of *M* 7 has been established by geophysicists and seismologists through numerous surveys of surface rupture features and paleoseismological excavations conducted throughout the region (for example, see [10, 18]). Planners in both state and federal agencies are concerned about the consequences of both physical and economic damage posed by the next major recurrence of a potentially catastrophic earthquake along the fault. The United States (US) Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sponsored a major research study [3] to investigate the multi-state regional consequences of a hypothetical event of *M* 7.7 on both buildings and bridges. The bridges in Mississippi discussed in this chapter represent critical lifelines exposed to the earthquake threat that are located along the evacua‐ tion routes and economic supply chains for communities in the northern part of the state as well as the tri-state metropolitan area of the city of Memphis, Tennessee, having population

A myriad of uncertainties exist for both the rare but potentially catastrophic seismic events and the multiple factors affecting the response of these soil-foundation-structure systems. In the absence of ground motion records for the severe historical events in the seismic zone under

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2013 Mullen; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2013 Mullen; licensee InTech. This is a chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

© 2013 Mullen; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

subject to significant ground shaking from the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ).

**Exposed to Moderate Seismic Hazard**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

C. Mullen

**1. Introduction**

of about 1.3 million.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/55334
