New Developments in Loss and Downtime Estimation for Resilience-Based Seismic Design and Assessment

Abstract eng:
Over the past many decades, building codes in the United States (and similarly in numerous other countries) have continually sought to improve the protection of life safety in the event of an earthquake. With the focus on life safety, the other aspects of seismic performance, such as direct economic losses and building repair times, have gone largely unconsidered. This has resulted in U.S. earthquakes causing fairly low numbers of fatalities but having very large economic costs, both in terms of direct economic losses and the long societal recovery time (e.g. 1994 Northridge). Similar trends can be seen in other recent earthquakes in developed countries around the world (e.g. Christchurch, New Zealand). In the U.S., the current building design approach and infrastructure, do not provide societal resilience in the event of a large earthquake in a populated region. The engineering community has turned a focus to resilience-based design and enhanced seismic risk assessment, with the goal of better understanding economic losses due to earthquakes (both direct loss and loss due to building closure). The FEMA P-58 Methodology (which was released in 2012) now provides an analysis method that gives unprecedented building-specific information about building resilience for earthquakes, providing information for all three resilience dimensions (safety, repair cost, and repair time). With the introduction of this new technology, an emerging viewpoint is that such beyond-safety considerations should be included in the design of a least some classes of structures. This paper discusses the emerging trend of resilience-based design in the U.S., including recent policy decisions, and examples of formative seismically resilient building projects.

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