The April 2016 Mw7.8 Muisne, Ecuador earthquake and its aftershocks led to hundreds of fatalities, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of people homeless, serious damage and collapses to buildings and infrastructure, and economic impact estimated at 3% of the national GDP. The performance of the natural and built environment was documented in the geotechnical, structural and nonstructural aspects by the GEER-ATC reconnaissance team that visited the most affected areas. The reconnaissance has yielded datasets, lessons, and suggestions for future research on: (i) seismological and recorded strong ground motions; (ii) application of US rapid assessment methods; (iii) geotechnical and infrastructure performance; (iv) site amplification and liquefaction; (v) structural and nonstructural effects and correlation to geotechnical effects; (vi) critical facilities and seismically-isolated structures response; (vii) use of advanced 3-D technologies to map drone and photo observations; (viii) case histories documentation of successful behavior in addition to failures; and (ix) community/government response and awareness aspects. In future research, the collected data, can be used, in combination with much-needed in-situ geotechnical testing and 3-D mapping to further understand the observations and analyze the good and bad behavior of the natural and built environment. Other needs include evaluation and testing of model houses that can be replicated fast in the field to house the homeless, and development of simple guidelines and procedures that can be used to improve the seismic performance of health care, transportation, and critical facilities.

Contributors

Alvarado, A., Alzamora, D., Antonaki, N., Arteta, C., Athanasopoulos-Zekkos, A., Bassal, P., Caicedo, A., Casares, B., Davila, D., Diaz, V., Diaz-Fanas, G., Gilsanz, R., González, O., Hernandez, L., Kishida, T., Kokkali, P., López, P., Luque, R., Lyvers, G.M., Maalouf, S., Mezher, J., Miranda, E., Morales Moncayo, E., Nikolaou, S., O’Rourke, T., Ochoa, I., O'Connor, J.S., Ripalda, F., Rodríguez, L.F., Rollins, K., Stavridis, A., Toulkeridis, T., Vaxevanis, E., Vera-Grunauer, X., Villagrán León, N., Wood, C., Yepes, H., Yepez, Y.