Structural Design and Robustness for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards

The special collection on Structural Design and Robustness for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards is available online in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/jsendh/community_resilience_natural_hazards).

Resilience is the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions (Presidential Policy Directive 21). Enhancing community resilience is a national imperative. The resilience of communities depends on the performance of the built environment and subsequent impacts on the social, economic, and public institutions on which the welfare of the community depends. The damage to communities and their recovery from environmental and geophysical hazards are characterized by large uncertainties in spatial and temporal domains. The current level of hazard impacts worldwide has shown that effective policies are needed to improve the resilience of communities, as well as the performance of individual facilities within the community. This special collection of the Journal of Structural Engineering contains eight papers that encompass a broad range of resilience topics.

Lin et al. (2019) present a new platform based on distributed simulation to enable the effects of interdependencies across infrastructure to be modeled using an analysis chain. They apply their approach to a wind engineering example to predict building damage and discuss application of their methodology to community resilience. The ability to perform comprehensive community resilience analysis begins with damage assessment of the built environment. In Guo and van de Lindt (2019), an improved data-driven hurricane wind field model based on the asymmetric Holland model for inner and outer core regions is presented. This model overcomes two previous shortcomings by improving the inner core model where wind speeds are highest and modeling surface wind speed changes due to changes in surface roughness. Further, the new wind model provides the ability to move the landfall location of a hurricane wind field, thereby providing the analyst the ability to vary scenarios.

Memari et al. (2018) develop a minimum portfolio of building fragilities for use in community-level modeling of the effects of tornado wind loading. They postulate that a typical community can be modeled by 19 building types when considering tornadoes and demonstrate the applicability on a simple virtual model of a community.

Joyner and Sasani (2018) investigate current building performance to seismic and wind hazards using a model of a 7-story reinforced concrete building located in Boston and San Francisco. They use the combination of repair cost and loss of function as a surrogate for resilience, i.e., a resilience metric, and determine the types of damage that most significantly contribute to a lack of resilience. For example, in wind events, damage to the roof covering for a flat roof is insignificant in their resilience assessment, but damage to glazing due to debris impact is not.

The 2016 edition of ASCE 7 (ASCE 2016), Chapter 6 on tsunami loads and effects, became the first national, consensus-based standard for tsunami resilience for application in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii and has been adopted by the 2018 International Building Code (ICC 2012). Chock et al. (2018) detail the process of development and discuss applications to the design of tsunami-resilient buildings within a community including the use of buildings for vertical evacuation.

Two papers within the special collection focus on or apply network analysis, namely, Zhang et al. (2018) and Didier et al. (2018). Zhang et al. (2018) present a methodology to predict the functionality loss of building portfolios considering the combination of building damage and disruption of utilities to those buildings. Their example focuses on Shelby County, Tennessee, and combines the residential building portfolio with utilities subjected to earthquake. Didier et al. (2018) investigate the seismic resilience of the water distribution and cellular communication networks following the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. They conclude that the evolution of community demand has substantial impact on the resilience of infrastructure systems with a decrease in the need for the water network but an increase for cellular service.

The final paper of this special collection investigates loss in business profit due to business interruption resulting from seismic damage. In the example application, the analysis was performed using balance sheet data from an Italian cheese factory and it is shown that loss in revenue due to business disruption is comparable to the cost of repairing the earthquake damage, underscoring the need for businesses to remain functional.

The breadth of subjects covered in this special collection underscores the need to investigate, model, and assess community resilience using a multidisciplinary perspective. We hope you enjoy the collection of papers spanning wind, earthquakes, and tsunamis with applications to residential buildings, network analysis, and businesses.