The Borah Peak, Idaho Earthquake of October 28, 1983—Strong Ground Motion

Abstract

The 1983 Borah Peak, Idaho Earthquake was the largest normal faulting event to occur in the last 20 years. There were no near-field recordings of ground motion during the main shock, however, thirteen accelerographs in a permanent array at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) recorded the event at epicentral distances of 90-110 km. Peak horizontal accelerations, or PGA, recorded at accelerographs above ground-floor level range from 0.037 to 0.187 g. Accelerographs at basement and free-field sites recorded as low as 0.022 g and as high as 0.078 g. Peak vertical accelerations range from 0.016 g at ground level to 0.059 g above ground-floor level. A temporary array of digital seismographs deployed by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the epicentral area recorded ground motion from six large aftershocks at epicentral distances of 4-45 km; the largest of these aftershocks also triggered four accelerographs in the INEL array. This paper presents our estimates of near-field ground motion derived from two separate analyses. The first analysis uses the attenuation of the aftershock PGA measurements to extrapolate the INEL main shock PGA measurements into the near-field. This estimates an upper limit of 0.8 g for near-field ground motion. In the second analysis, a set of main shock accelerograms were synthesized. Wave propagation effects were determined from aftershock recordings at one of the USGS portable stations and an INEL seismograph station. These effects were removed from one of the INEL main shock acceleration traces. The synthetic accelerograms were derived for a hypothetical station southwest of Mackay, Idaho. The PGA measured from the synthetic accelerograms were 0.08, 0.14, 0.15, 0.23 g. These estimates correlate well with ground motion expected for an area of intensity VII.