h Tahghighi - Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Kashan, Kashan, Iran,

The recent massive earthquakes have shown how human lives, buildings and infrastructures are endangered by fault surface ruptures. Despite this few building codes contains risk reducing provisions regarding fault surface ruptures and accompanying soil deformations. This paper presents a summary of observations on the damages caused by the earthquake fault induced surface rupture. Besides, a hybrid methodology to synthesize broad-band near-fault time history and brief discussion on design of lifelines, whose constructions across active faults can not beavoided in over-populated earthquake-prone countries are included.

civil infrastructures, seismic design, earthquake, near-fault