A note on the wave-passage effects in out-of-plane response of long structures to strong earthquake pulses

Elementary consequences of the wave-passage effects are described for out-of-plane response of long structures, excited by SH wave earthquake ground motion pulses propagating along their longitudinal axis. For the passage times in the range of 0.005–0.10 s, the maximum column drifts can increase several folds due to the combined action of out-of-plane and torsional response. Because most of the seismic wave energy do not arrive at a site vertically, the common engineering assumption that it does, leads to nonconservative response estimates.