Performance-Based Retrofit of School Buildings in British Columbia, Canada

In 2004, the Province of British Columbia, on the West Coast of Canada, announced a 10–15 year, $1.5 billion seismic retrofit program for the province's 750 at-risk public schools. The purpose of this earthquake preparedness initiative is to accelerate the upgrading of school public safety in the moderate and high seismicity regions of the province. Given the magnitude of the mitigation program, the province's Ministry of Education made a commitment to support the development of state-of-the-art performance-based seismic engineering technology for achieving optimum safety within a cost-effective mitigation framework, which could not be achieved based on current practice. This paper describes a non-linear performance-based methodology that has been developed to provide the framework for the drafting of these technical guidelines. This methodology is the culmination of more than five years of applied research and extensive and intensive peer review.