Analysis of observed seismic damages on historic adobe-mud brick structures of bam citadel, affected by the 2003 bam earthquake

From past to the present, lessons learned from structural behaviour of buildings during destructive earthquakes have been used to advance construction techniques, and more recently, such lessons have fostered the development of methods and techniques to have more engineering interventions and preservation disciplines on historically or culturally important structures. Generally, post-earthquake damage assessments will offer an opportunity to understand why historic buildings fail, and will provide information that can serve as the basis for their seismic improvement. The tragedy of December 26, 2003 Bam earthquake, and what happened over the Bam Citadel, as a result, entails the need to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of historic adobe structures. Therefore, documentation of the actual damages resulting from strong ground motions are essential to understand how historic adobe buildings perform, or in fact behave at the time of earthquakes. In this case, survey about structural behavior of this vulnerable type of construction material, analyzing its seismic weakness, which may help in preventing social, cultural and economic losses against a subsequent earthquake that may happen in the near future. Therefore, in this paper to have better insight about the possible seismic damages on historic adobe-mud brick structures, the damages on seismically destructed Citadel of Bam are analyzed in details, the possible damages that the consciousness of their occurrence can result in better anti-seismic intervention on historic adobe structures.