We created Quaketek in response to a growing problem, we are experiencing more earthquakes. Now, this isn’t to say that that there are more earthquakes (although fracking can cause them) but rather our cities are getting larger. As urban sprawl continues and populations grow in earthquake prone areas, more people experience earthquakes.

Regrettably, however, earthquake protection in many seismic areas is not sustainable. With the exception of hospitals and certain institutions, most building codes do not require that buildings remain useable. Complying with the most modern code requirements tends to ensure that buildings protect the occupants, however, may need to be torn down after a large earthquake. This approach increases economic costs following an earthquake but more importantly, it ignores social issues, as people are displaced and lose their homes and workplaces.

Our vision, therefore, is that when buildings face off against earthquakes: the building wins, every time, period. Our mission is to make seismic dampers affordable, easy to use and therefore commonplace in buildings in all at-risk areas.

We’ve started work on our mission by investing heavily in streamlining our manufacturing facility. Although our team has been building dampers for more than 25 years, our facilities were never optimized for such specific manufacturing requirements. With our new facility we’re now optimized for the production of large volumes of friction dampers. We believe that as an industry we can make seismic damping technologies more accessible. That designing with seismic dampers allows for reductions in structural costs, all while reducing the hidden social costs of these disasters.

On The Ropes

We hope to continue this mission by working with the industry in order to make damping technologies more accessible. We aim to expand the knowledge and usage of damping technologies so that every building can eventually be protected against earthquakes.

Keep on fighting the good fight

Thank you for reading our first post! We hope to use this space to have conversations on how we can better protect our communities, discuss how to use damping technologies or simply discuss how to improve earthquake protection. We’ll do our best to create dedicated posts on any common trends and questions we receive and publish them in order to share the knowledge. Please feel free to contact us directly, through social media or post on our blog.