Seismic Performance Requirements in the Urban Waterfront: Case Study—Repurposed 1940s Navy Wharf

This paper provides a case study involving the waterfront redevelopment of a decommissioned US Navy facility with a 1940s wharf repurposed as a pedestrian promenade. The conversion to a publicly-accessible structure triggered special seismic performance criteria and the application of multiple seismic standards from different regulators. The seismic design had to address strong ground motions, weak marine soils and large ground deformations, aging infrastructure, deep soil mixing (DSM) ground improvements, and late major project changes requiring reconsideration of the kinematic inertial (K+I) load combinations on the pile-supported wharf. The design team changed from a conservative 100%/100% combination to an approach considering the time history analysis results from the DSM design analyses, using relative phasing of the kinematic and inertial responses to generate K+I combinations for the governing load cases. This paper describes the basis and details for the final approach.

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