The Cascadia subduction zone lies in wait of the best-laid plans of developers, architects and engineers on the Oregon Coast.

In the aftermath of a major earthquake, impacts to bridges and roads are concerns of parties inland, but avoidance or survival of a wall of seawater are top of mind for people along the coast.

State policy has changed. A law that barred state grants being awarded to projects in tsunami zones was repealed in the Legislature’s previous session, allowing more construction in such areas.

Meanwhile, at Yaquina Bay in Newport, crews are building for Oregon State University a showcase facility, the Marine Studies Building at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, able to withstand a major earthquake and tsunami. The three-story building will top out at over 47 feet and feature an escape area for the approximately 150 anticipated occupants.

Yost Grube Hall Architecture designed the 72,000-square-foot building so that it could be inundated during a tsunami with no loss of life. The windows will be able to break away, allowing water to flow through the ground floor while occupants stay safe at higher points.

“The structure and the meat and bones of the building are designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami,” Yost Grube Hall Architecture principal Tom Robbins said. “A lot of the systems in the building are sacrificial.”

YGH used lessons learned from its experiences designing U.S. embassies in several nations, in which blast analyses and other studies were performed. YGH estimates one or two building columns could be taken out and this new structure would still stand, Robbins said.

The design firm also worked with a tsunami modeler at the University of Washington to understand the severity of a potential tsunami hitting Yaquina Bay.

The building’s design is not especially complicated in concept. To keep most of the structure out of a possible tsunami’s path, it made sense to go tall. The building’s stories, which have tall ceilings, will be stacked on top of each other to create more height.

“Just by arranging the building carefully, we were able to get out of the tsunami zone fairly quickly,” Robbins said. “The dumb and simple thing was how to stack this building to get where you want to go.”

The building’s roots go deep underground.

“The building is much like an iceberg,” Robbins said. “You see about a third of it above grade, and two-thirds of it is below grade.”

The engineering consultant is KPFF Consulting Engineers, and the general contractor is Andersen Construction. Officials expect work to wrap up in late spring 2020.

To stabilize the sandy soils, Andersen used deep soil mixing to nearly 100 feet below ground. Crews pumped in approximately 27,380 cubic yards of grout.

Communities up and down the coast are looking to the Marine Studies Building as an example of what can be done.

“We wanted to make this a demonstration project – how to responsibly build in a tsunami zone such as Newport,” Robbins said.

At the same time, it was important to build within a budget.

“One of the desires (and) goals of this project is to do this in a financially responsible way,” Robbins said. “Take proven methods of construction. You can do this without a great cost premium. If you were building another structure in a tsunami zone, there are methods you can employ.”

OSU owns the building, but university scientists regularly work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“This is a space for collaboration,” Robbins said.

Large-scale projects are fairly rare on the Oregon Coast, where small tax bases and populations limit development. However, communities are examining how to fortify their built environments against a potentially devastating tsunami.

When Oregon repealed the ban on state grants in tsunami zones as a head-in-the-sand approach to disaster preparedness, national media jumped on the story quickly. But Oregon Rep. David Gomberg, D-Neotsu, said repealing the ban made sense.

“We have state regulations that don’t allow us to use any grants or state money in the inundation zone or to get out of the inundation zone,” he said.

Gomberg expressed skepticism that the changes would prompt a rush of construction in vulnerable areas.

“I’m not hearing anybody anxious to build in the zones,” he said. “I’m hearing about the infrastructure we have, and how we update it or move it.”

Water districts are required by state law to conduct an annual master plan. Pat Cox, manager of the Nesika Beach-Ophir Water District on the southern Oregon coast, said the cost for doing a master plan has risen from $50,000 to $90,000 because of seismic requirements.

“Now it’s starting to hurt,” he said.

Emergency planning is often made more complicated than it needs to be, according to Cox.

“It always makes me scratch my head when they do these efforts for all these plans, when really it’s run uphill as fast as you can when an earthquake happens,” he said.

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An Oregon State University marine research facility under construction in Newport is engineered to be resilient in the face of the worst conditions nature has to offer.

The three-story Marine Studies Building at the Hatfield Marine Science Center was designed to stand up to a magnitude 9.0 subduction zone earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which could bring waves up to 31 feet in height.

“As far as resiliency goes, there hasn’t been a building built like this on the west coast,” said Dave Raleigh, OSU‘s project construction manager.

The university is also hoping the unique facility will be draw hundreds more full-time students to its growing campus on the Oregon coast.

Andersen Construction is the general contractor on the $61.7 million project, which was designed by Yost Grube Hall Architecture. KPFF Consulting Engineers is performing structural engineering work.

The facility consists of a pair of steel-framed buildings linked with a seismic joint. The taller of the two buildings will serve as a tsunami evacuation site and will be accessed via a reinforced concrete ramp.  It will be one of just two vertical evacuation facilities in the Pacific Northwest, and will have capacity for 900 people.

Combined, the two three-story buildings will have some 72,000 square feet of floor area split into academic and research wings, along with a two-story community space with an auditorium and laboratories.

“Because it’s built to codes that are not yet in place, it’s extremely robust,” said Andersen Construction Superintendent Mark Reusser, referring to proposed Universal Building Code additions governing tsunami and earthquake resilience.

The key to withstanding a magnitude 9 quake, KPFF Principal Josh Richards said last year, comes from honeycomb-style, deep-soil foundation columns reaching over 100 feet below the sandy surface soils. The overlapping grid-like foundation is mutually supportive when experiencing lateral stress, such as that caused by an earthquake or tsunami.

In addition, deep soil mixing, which has been used in Japan since the 1950s and in California since the ’70s, uses cement-like materials to fill or blend with native soil. This increases soil strength and compressibility – as well as earthquake survivability.

“We’re not really trying to demonstrate anything,” said Raleigh. “We’re just trying to make the building safe for the community user. We’re taking a lot of things into consideration; what’s going to cause a tsunami is a huge earthquake, so that’s really what this is based on, that 2,500 year event.”

Crews began work on the project in March 2018, and since then structural steel work has been completed and steel decking has been placed on the second and third floors in preparation for slab-on-deck concrete pours. Last week saw the first pour of the slab-on-deck concrete roof, a process that should be completed on the second and third floors by mid-April. The final slab-on-grade pour by should be completed by the end of next month.

“We’re pouring from the roof down and then pouring the slab-on-grade afterward,” Reusser said. “Mainly that’s to protect against the weather here and the polished concrete floors, so that the polished slab-on-grade concrete floors would not get trashed by the heavy construction work of installing the structural steel.”

Substantial completion of the project is expected by March 2020, with OSU staff moving into the new facility that spring in preparation for the start of classes that summer.

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Just how does one make a large structure resistant to one of the most damaging forces of nature? That’s the central challenge at hand for general contractor Andersen Construction as it embarks on a $50 million expansion of Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

A ground-breaking ceremony last week kicked off a project several years in the making. OSU is hoping the new world-class research facility will attract hundreds more full-time students to its growing campus on the Oregon coast. The structure also is planned as just the second vertical tsunami evacuation site in the United States.

Portland’s Yost Grube Hall Architecture, a firm currently working on a U.S. embassy in Mozambique and another in Turkmenistan, designed the new OSU facility. It will actually be a pair of steel-framed buildings linked with a seismic joint. The taller of the two will include the evacuation site, and be built to withstand a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a resulting tsunami wave up to 31 feet in height.

Combined, the two buildings will be some 72,000 square feet. The rooftop evacuation site, 47 feet above ground, will have room for up to 900 people.

“What we heard was that there needed to be a vertical evacuation feature, because not all people can walk the 12 to 20 minutes that will be required to get out of the area (in the event of a tsunami),” said Steve Clark, OSU vice president for university relations and marketing. “So we (planned) the building with the idea that this would serve not only as a resilient building and sustain the impact of the earthquake and the inundations of the waves that come into the bay, but also serve as a point of relief for evacuation for those who can’t get to Safe Haven Hill.”

No existing facility is like the one now being built, KPFF Engineering structural principal Josh Richards said. The only other vertical tsunami evacuation facility in the United States was built in 2015 for the Ocosta School District in Westport, Washington, and it is distinctly different in design and capability.

“There are no current examples that the facility is explicitly modeled after,” he said.

The latest expansion plans were revealed by OSU in November. Set for completion in fall 2019, it will feature a three-story academic and research wing, along with a two-story community space, an auditorium and laboratories. An emergency ramp will connect the ground level with the top of the auditorium and the academic wing’s roof. There, the evacuation site will provide space for people unable to reach Newport’s Safe Haven Hill a half-mile south of the science center.

Following widespread criticism in 2016 that the site was unsafe for its intended purpose, OSU President Ed Ray appointed a committee to come up with additional safety requirements for the new facility. As a result, the proposed building had to be able to survive a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami expected to move at an estimated 30 mph.

But making this innovative building come alive is no ordinary design-and-build job.

“Oh, that’s for sure,” Andersen Construction Superintendent Mark Reusser said.

His company is tasked with building the Hatfield expansion on a man-made sand spit that already holds the rest of the science center, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Operations Center – Pacific. This presents some serious geotechnical challenges because during an earthquake local soils are expected to liquefy and cause widespread surface instability.

The key to withstanding a magnitude 9 quake, Richards said, comes from honeycomb-style, deep-soil foundation columns reaching 100 feet or more below the sandy surface. Instead of traditional support columns, the overlapping grid-like foundation is mutually supportive when experiencing lateral stress, such as that caused by an earthquake or tsunami. Even as the soil liquefies, the entire building is designed to remain intact and upright.

In addition, deep soil mixing is also in play. Used in Japan since the 1950s and in California since the ’70s, this technique uses cement-like materials to fill or blend with native soil. It increases soil strength and compressibility, allowing for greater stability during a seismic event.

“There’s about a million pounds of cement that’s going to be mixed in the ground to complete the deep soil mixing for the foundation,” Reusser said. “That sets that building up so that it won’t float away. It can’t wash away. You can’t wash the ground out from underneath it and it can’t settle too much.”

The deep soil mix used for the Hatfield project consists of a cementitious grout mixed with existing soil through an auguring process, Richards said. This creates hardened soil columns, which in turn support concrete spread and mat footings as part of the deep soil grid.

“The perimeter deep soil mixed columns also protect from soil scour and loss of support that would occur around the building during the tsunami event,” he said.

“It’s essentially a grid or a matrix type of structure that goes down that deep,” added Jerry Waters, associate principal and senior project designer for Yost Grube Hall. “They (foundation supports) are all connected, and it’s a grid … you can kind of visualize a honeycomb system, so it will act as one big monolith.”

After an earthquake’s tremors subside, a tsunami wave 30 feet or taller would be expected to strike the new facility. Both buildings will feature steel framing with concrete core walls and slabs built to resist lateral seismic and tsunami loads, Richards said. Designers used Federal Emergency Management Agency documents produced after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan to create a pair of structures able to provide plenty of redundancy against collapse.

“The criteria used are the same as required for U.S. embassy or other federal facility designs,” Richards said. “It includes removing select columns and other large load-carrying elements in the structure, and requires adequate detailing and member design in order to maintain load path continuity for these conditions.”

That will be critical for any quake survivors taking shelter atop the building.

“It has more robust than normal connections,” Waters said. “But at same time the steel has a better capability of sort of some flexure compared to concrete.”

Even with substantial modeling and testing, only a real earthquake will offer proof of survivability. But designers and engineers are confident in their work.

“First, you have to withstand the potential seismic event, and then you have to be resilient enough to potentially withstand a tsunami,” Waters said. “And, again, it’s somewhat unknown, but obviously there has been quite a bit of data used to simulate and estimate the magnitude of damage the building will receive.”

The final result should showcase world-class engineering as well as maintain Oregon’s role as a premier destination for scientific research, Clark said.

“We wanted to demonstrate a commitment to Oregon’s coast and throughout the world, that, actually, this can be the location for important public features,” he said. “And if they’re built correctly, and in the right location and in the right way, our coastlines aren’t closed for business.”

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Designing an educational facility for a university usually isn’t like designing a U.S. embassy. But an expansion of Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport presented Yost Grube Hall Architecture many challenges similar to those posed by a government building on foreign soil.

“We do a lot of work for U.S. State Department,” YGH principal Tom Robbins said. “With embassies, you design for a bomb going off. In both cases you have to design for things you don’t want to happen.”

What OSU officials don’t want is for an earthquake and resultant tsunami to kill or injure people in or near the facility. That risk is a major concern for the new $50 million, 72,000-square-foot building that will sit on a man-made sand spit in Yaquina Bay. The site sits squarely inside the expected inundation zone in a sizable seismic event.

A three-story core space will connect to a two-story wing that will have an auditorium, an innovation lab and community space. The building is designed to serve as a “vertical evacuation” site. The only similar structure in the U.S. is Ocosta Elementary School near the Pacific Ocean in Westport, Washington.

“I would say this has been more intriguing (than an embassy project) because it has not been done before,” Robbins said. “It’s been harder due to the defining criteria. I would also say it is also much more exciting.”

The building had to be able to withstand a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami. Such an earthquake would likely cause liquefaction, softening the land directly underneath. Then a predicted 30-foot-tall wall of water would hit the building at 30 mph. The inundation zone would likely extend beyond OSU’s Newport campus.

“The tsunami is the attention-grabber,” Robbins said. “The building is designed to take an impact. We did a number of computer simulations on debris flow. We do kind of benefit from the location. The site likely won’t have a lot of debris.”

In order to address the likelihood of liquefaction, the building’s foundation will extend more than 100 feet below the surface – more than twice the 45-foot height above ground. A progressive collapse system will keep the building upright even if two of its columns collapse.

The building will also serve evacuees unable to reach Newport’s Safe Haven Hill site, which is approximately a 15-minute jog from the city. A ramp will allow people to reach the roof, and two staircases inside will be built within a hardened shell. Also, an elevator within the shell will rely on a separate power source.

“You have to pay attention to everything from the foundation as well as scouring from the tsunami,” said Robert Cowen, director of the Hatfield Marine Science Center. “We will have large items striking the building. Engineers have looked at all of the aspects.”

General contractor Andersen Construction, structural engineer KPFF and geotechnical engineer GRI all oversaw design elements. That information was then checked by OSU’s own engineers.

“It has been examined by a large number of engineers,” Cowen said. “We had a suite of engineers with an oversight committee examine how the data was being looked at and interpreted.”

That work gave OSU officials confidence that the site could accommodate a structure able to serve students and the five state and federal agencies currently on the campus, but also survive an earthquake and tsunami. The idea was to allow different disciplines to work in a combined environment. It will have rolling whiteboards, an auditorium, classrooms and office space.

“We have designed it with open laboratories,” Cowen said. “You might find a physicist next to a marine biologist next to a resource economist. We are trying to meet the needs of a broad group.”

OSU is also hoping to prove critics wrong and show that a safe building can be built in a seismically active coastal area.

“We want to make this building a demonstration project of how to build responsibly in a tsunami zone,” Robbins said. “Our team is excited about that.”

On the Boards is a 91��Ƶ feature offering a look at the projects in Oregon being tackled by local architecture firms. To have your firm’s projects considered, contact 91��Ƶ architecture and engineering reporter Kent Hohlfeld at 503-802-7224 or khohlfeld@djcOregon.com.

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