Engineers in California, USA, have unleashed high-intensity artificial earthquakes on a five-storey building packed with medical equipment.

The mock hospital has been built on a giant “shake table” which can subject the building to movements similar to real earthquakes, BBC reported.

The tests are designed to determine if hospitals built on rubber bearings could function after a quake.

The use of these rubber bearings is common in earthquake-prone Japan. They uncouple the building from the motion of the ground during an earthquake, like putting the building on roller skates.

However, US scientists say that most research has so far concentrated on the structural integrity of buildings after an earthquake, very little examined how vital contents such as stairs, lifts and other parts of a building that allowed it to fulfil its function fared after a major seismic event.

On the first day of testing in early April, the shake table subjected the building to identical motions to those recorded during the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, and the 8.8-magnitude Chile earthquake in 2010.

The engineers found that the rubber bearings successfully protected the building from most of the damaging lateral motion that it would experience during a real earthquake. It also left lifts, stairs, medical equipment and other machinery intact, although there was some minor cosmetic damage. “If the equipment had been life-support systems keeping real people alive, then the bearings would have saved their lives,” engineers explained.

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