Select Liquefaction Case Histories from the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence

Abstract

The 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence began with the 4 September 2010, M_w7.1 Darfield earthquake and includes up to ten events that induced liquefaction. Most notably, widespread liquefaction was induced by the Darfield and M_w6.2 Christchurch earthquakes. The combination of well-documented liquefaction response during multiple events, densely recorded ground motions for the events, and detailed subsurface characterization provides an unprecedented opportunity to add well-documented case histories to the liquefaction database. This paper presents and applies 50 high-quality cone penetration test (CPT) liquefaction case histories to evaluate three commonly used, deterministic, CPT-based simplified liquefaction evaluation procedures. While all the procedures predicted the majority of the cases correctly, the procedure proposed by Idriss and Boulanger (2008) results in the lowest error index for the case histories analyzed, thus indicating better predictions of the observed liquefaction response.