1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

The Mw = 6.4 November 26, 2019 02:54 UTC earthquake struck near the city of Durrës, Thumanë. The earthquake struck on 26 November, resulting in 51 deaths and up to 750 people injured. Many buildings in Durrës and Thumanë were collapsed and many others were seriously damaged. The inspection of the damaged buildings and declared uninhabitable, revealed many problems related to their design. After 1990 and especially after 2000 the construction of multi-storey reinforced concrete buildings (9-12 floors) mainly for residential and service facilities was very intensive. These structures are mainly designed referring to old Albanian design codes KTP-89 and these buildings are the ones most damaged by seismic event and are mainly related to bypassing the design codes and specific criteria for structures in seismic areas. But it should be noted that one of the reasons for their non-collapse is that they are designed as very elastic structures so consequently having reduced seismic forces, but not meet the requirements of Eurocode 8 and KTP-89 to other criteria. To illustrate the above problem, we will show the most common avoidances from general rules of design according to EC8. The fundamental periods for 9 to12 floors buildings are much larger that the values that should have these type of structures according to design codes. The factors related to the above are and causing the damage, collapse of the filling and the partition walls and also creating panic and endangering the lives of residents are the element designs such of hidden beams in the slabs, lack of diaphragms and cores. Inadequate design of foundations causes the differentials settlements and inclination of objects as well. Another problem is incorrect dimensioning of seismic gaps between two structures.