2024 EERI Annual Meeting (2024AM)

Building Codes and Building Performance

This special session will discuss recent and ongoing efforts to create building code requirements for resilient design for functional recovery. The concept of functional recovery has been advanced in recent years to mobilize building design and mitigation decisions that reduce the long-term effects of earthquake-induced building damage, enhancing community resilience. The interest in this concept is motivated by increasing recognition that design of buildings to life safety standards may not be sufficient to ensure thriving and prosperous post-earthquake communities. Improving post-earthquake reoccupancy and functional recovery has recently received broad interest and support among community resilience advocates, earthquake risk mitigation professionals, building design practitioners, code and standard developers, and building owners. This session will discuss ongoing efforts to explore design criteria and related provisions for improving functional recovery in new building design in the U.S. National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) Recommended Provisions. The authors are leading and participating in the Functional Recovery Task Committee, which exists as part of the Building Seismic Safety Council’s Provisions Update Committee and is funded by FEMA. The Task Committee is charged with developing technical proposals and other resources regarding design of new buildings to meet post-earthquake functional recovery performance objectives within the context of the 2026 NEHRP Provisions. This session will include a series of short presentations that describe ongoing work to create and assign functional recovery categories for building occupancies and services, identify the hazard level(s) applicable for these objectives, and develop prescriptive provisions for each category. The session will highlight the key ideas being proposed to implement in a possible Functional Recovery Standard, showing how probabilistic assessment of functional recovery has been used to develop and support the key ideas. We will also discuss how input from a broad group of stakeholders has influenced the direction of the efforts.

Session Format: The session will consist of a series of technical presentations followed by a panel Q&A. Questions from the audience will be collected throughout the session and discussed during the panel Q&A.