VELACS project : A summary of achievements

In a collaborative and unprecedentent effort, seven major universities from United States and England studied the liquefaction phenomena and its consequences by conducting extensive centrifuge tests on nine carefully selected centrifuge models. In addition, more than 20 groups of researchers from all over the world participated in a Class-A prediction exercise to predict the response of centrifuge models before they were conducted. This paper summarizes the lessons learned from the VELACS project in relation to repeatability of centrifuge models and perfomance of the existing numerical procedures in analyzing soil liquefaction and its consequences.(AU)

Football stadia disaster in the United Kingdom : Learning from tragedy?

The purpose of this paper is to examine a number of sports stadia disaster involving British fans since 1971. While each of the four incidents described (Ibrox 1971, Bradford 1985, Heysel 1985, Hillsborough 1989) can be described as crises in their own right (and led to the deaths of about 250 people in total) it is argued here that they are the effect of a wider crisis of management within the football industry, rooted in poor and inadequate management of sports stadia and the crowds that use them. It should be noted from the outset, however, that this is not simply a British phenomena, as the tragedies in Mexico City (1985) and Bastia (1992) indicate and that findings from this research should be use to all involved in the management of sporting events (AU)

Earthquake induced settlements for New England seismicity

Based on the simplified approximate methodologies proposed by Tokimatsu and seed (1984, 1987) and Ishihara and Yoshimine (1992), charts were developed to estimate earthquke induced settlements in saturated as well as dry sands relative to New England seismicity. The charts are directly usable requiring only adequate SPT (blow count) data and the position of the groundwater table for a project site. A magnitude 6.5 earthquake with a peak ground acceleration of 0.12 g was adopted to characterize a desing earthquake for the New England region (AU)

The kegworth air crash : A crisis in three phases?

The Kegworth air crash has attracted considerable media attention concerning the causes of the accident. While the pilots of the aircraft have shouldered the bulk of the blame to date, this paper argues that the roots of the crash are much more complex than simply pilot error. The paper explores the crisis in three phases-the crisis of management, the operational phase and the crisis of legitimation- in an attempt to examine the process of crisis development.(AU)