Recent advances in tsunami design of coastal structures

The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami initiated a rapid increase in tsunami research, particularly as it relates to the performance of coastal structures during tsunami inundation. The subsequent Chile tsunami in 2010 and Great Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (or Tohoku Tsunami) in 2011 re-invigorated the urgency of developing design provisions for tsunami loading on coastal structures. The culmination of this experimental and theoretical research, and field reconnaissance after damaging tsunamis, resulted in the development of a new Chapter 6 “Tsunami Loads and Effects” in the ASCE7-16 Standard “Minimum Design Loads and Asso-ciate Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures”. This paper briefly reviews the ASCE7-16 tsunami design provisions. The application of these provisions to the design of new tsunami vertical evacuation refuge struc-tures in Oregon and Washington States, and new multistory residential buildings in Waikiki, Hawaii, will be presented. This paper also introduces recent modifications to the tsunami design provisions approved for the ASCE7-22 Standard published in December 2021. These modifications were prompted by recent laboratory research, observations after the earthquake and tsunami in Palu, Indonesia, and updates to numerical model-ing procedures for tsunami inundation.