Civil and geotechnical engineers may be shaken to hear next month's evaluation of the methods used to assess the damage that a devastating earthquake and resulting soil liquefaction might do to transportations systems, dams, buildings and waterfront structures. For the past four years, modern engineering methods have been undergoing the scrutiny of 30 researcher teams from the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Using scaled models of structures and soils and simulated earthquakes in centrifuges, the researchers compared predicted responses to the actual centrifuge results. Their findings will be presented Oct. 17-20 at UC Davis. Co-sponsored by the California Institute of Technology and funded by the National Science Foundation, the project is expected to help engineers design structures better able to survive soil liquefaction during earthquakes. "The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of current methods of liquefaction analysis and to provide safe and economical methods to analyze the safety of infrastructure systems," says UC Davis engineering professor Kandiah Arulanandan (also known as "Arul"), the prinicipal investigator. "All procedures now used are empirical or semiempirical, based on 'after-the-event' observation of failures that have not been instrumented to study the response."