Downtown Buildings

[AllanY2525]

we had a 3.2 earthquake here in the DC/MD area last year.....and there are no frack wells
in my area.

I think the main thing here is due diligence with regard to injection wells.  Proper
geological surveing must be done before setting up an injection well.  The earthquake near
Weathersfield was due to an un-discovered fault line.  Proper surveying could have found
the fault line before the injection well went online.

[Youngstownshrimp]

I grew up in Asia and have experienced earthquakes.  Really, these tremors, although I don't like them, are bumps in the road.

[Rick Rowlands]

We do have to remember that there is not enough energy available to create an earthquake much larger than a 3.0 in this area, and the ones large enough to cause major building damage have hundreds of times more energy than what we have seen here.  What has been causing quakes in this area, localized slipping of some shale formations underground, is trivial compared to one plate subducting under another. 

All of our downtown skyscrapers are steel framed.  The major concern is for loose terracotta, which is just as likely to fall from normal freeze thaw cycles and deferred maintenance.

[AllanY2525]

Lots of factors in that.  I don't know much about the engineering behind these
old buildings, but stuff below would affect the damage level:

steel skeleton construction vs frame or masonry only.
how much loose masonry exterior
windows and how they are constructed
foundation and how it is constructed
height of the building
when it was built

[jay]

Pieces of the Wick Building have also fallen off over the years.

[jay]

With the events of today, I was thinking about downtown buildings and earthquakes.

Which buildings in and around the downtown area would suffer the most damage during an even larger earthquake?

I would worry about the former Central Tower Building.  It lost a few pieces of an upper level wall in recent years.