Report No: CCEER-93-3

Authors: David Sanders, Bruce Douglas, and Troy Martin

Date: September 1993

Sponsoring Agency:

Nevada Department of Transportation

Performing Organization:

Department of Civil Engineering/258

University of Nevada, Reno

Reno, Nevada 89557

Executive Summary:

The purpose of this study is to evaluate Nevada’s, as well as other states’, seismic prioritization procedures. Six methods were located and analyzed so that the strong and weak points of each method could be identified. Once identified, the strengths from each of the various methods were incorporated into a proposed new method to be used by the Nevada Department of Transportation.

The six seismic prioritization procedures were from the states of Nevada, California, Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Washington. Twenty bridges from the Nevada bridge inventory were selected and evaluated using five of the six above mentioned methods. The Illinois method was omitted since it is a detailed, statistically sophisticated method that requires considerably more input information than the other methods. Then a new method was developed and used to evaluate the same twenty bridges. The results from the proposed new method were then compared with the results from the other methods (Summary by authors).