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October 14, 2008

Session 2C: Retrofitting: How to Deal with What You Have
In a built city, often times planning does not address the concerns of preexisting structures or infrastructure. How does a city deal with its investment? Where are old buildings and historic structures and what measures can be taken to protect these financial and cultural investments? Examples of what can be done with historic structures will be presented, as well as issues related to structural ductility.

Moderator: Lynne Ozawa
Hal Bernson, Los Angeles City Councilman (ret.)
Craig D. Comartin, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s Concrete Coalition, Presentation
Chris Poland, Chairman  & CEO, Degenkolb, Presentation

Healthy cities continuously grow by driving economic development while protecting their cultural heritage. Success, in part, depends on a healthy built environment that is rooted in contemporary urban planning, sustainability and disaster resilience. To be disaster resilient, a city must understand it’s hazards, how much damage it can endure, and how much retrofit is needed. The needed retrofit will not occur automatically. Cities must determine which buildings and lifelines are needed for response and recovery and take step to insure they are adequate. Many will require strengthening. Hospitals, emergency operation centers, city halls and emergency shelters are needed immediately. Lifelines, housing, schools, doctor’s offices and retail shopping centers are needed within 30 to 60 days to assure there is a workforce available to support full recovery. Commercial and industrial facilities need to be encouraged to understand their vulnerabilities and take steps to strengthen their buildings to minimize long-term downtime. Buildings needed for recovery do not need to be brought up to the same standards as enforced for new buildings. The International Existing Building Codes provides the needed guidance. Cities need only determine the small subset of buildings that need mandatory strengthening, and the larger group that need to be encouraged through incentives.

Finding and fixing dangerous buildings

by Craig D. Comartin

Poor seismic performance of concrete buildings has been demonstrated dramatically in recent earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan, Sumatra, Pakistan, China and in the U.S.’s moderate Northridge earthquake in 1994. These buildings are widespread. They were a prevalent construction type in the western U.S. prior to enforcement of codes for ductile concrete in the mid-1970s.  EERI and IAEE’s World Housing Encyclopedia contains 26 reports from 20 countries on this construction type, including some of the most populous countries in the world. The exposure to life and property loss in a major earthquake is immense. Many concrete buildings have high occupancies, including residential, commercial, and critical services. Severe damage can lead to critical loss of building contents and risk of ruin for business occupants. Partial or complete collapse results in large numbers of casualties.  The Concrete Coalition has initiated a concerted effort to advocate the identification of these dangerous concrete buildings and the development of sensible solutions. The intent is to facilitate future cooperation and solidarity as local communities update/prepare mitigation plans and strategies to reduce the risk associated with these buildings.