With the increasing desire for more resilient buildings, there is a thirst for practical guidance to help owners and designers achieve their resilience goals. Last month, I discussed a set of guidelines for increasing the resilience of buildings developed by Washington, D.C.’s, Department of Energy and Environment. The document provides specific design recommendations regarding flood and temperature hazards but does not provide any way to measure the increased resilience to compare to the owner’s design goals. This problem is not unique to the D.C. guidelines but rather is common to almost all resilience programs.
In this column, I would like to discuss another example of an attempt to provide design guidance: Recently introduced California State Assembly, AB 1329, requires the state to develop functional recovery standards specifically for earthquakes. According to a recent study by FEMA, 20%-40% of buildings designed to modern codes will be unfit for occupancy after a major seismic event, taking months or years to recover. In addition, repair of an additional 15%-20% of buildings would be uneconomical, resulting in their demolition. Therefore, the need for higher standards is clear if we want our communities to remain functional after an extreme event.