Vulnerability Assessments of Structural Frames for Critical Facilities

There currently is no peer reviewed or broadly accepted protocols for conducting vulnerability assessments on the structural frame of buildings. This lack of protocols and lack of uniformity in vulnerability assessments is particularly important when the building is located in an area that might be subject to a natural hazard event such as a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake or a flood. The design firm conducting the assessment is required to determine what might constitute a vulnerability based on their knowledge of the building, the hazard, or the owner's stated operational intent during or after any or all of these potential hazards. The vulnerability of the structural frame of a critical facility (or any other building) depends on: (1) Age (which influences the codes and standards that were available at the time of design) (2) Quality of design and construction (3) Type of construction (wood, concrete, steel, masonry or combinations of these and other materials) (4) Risk to the structural frame from events such as an earthquake, a hurricane or a tornado, or from a man-made hazard such as a bomb blast (5) Number and extent of past modifications to the building (6) Deterioration (corrosion decay, termite damage) These issues are crucial in understanding how vulnerable any particular building is to an unexpected load (i.e. hurricane or bomb) or to an expected load but one that has not ever occurred or not occurred recently. These issues are very important for the vulnerability assessment team to understand before they can state with some confidence that the building that is being assessed can be expected to perform in some stated manner when future catastrophic events might occur. This paper will explore what a vulnerability assessment protocol for the structural frame should include, how a standardized protocol would be helpful to both the engineering profession and the building owners, and how such a protocol might reduce potential liability and misunderstandings with owners or future building buyers if a "standardized gage" could be developed that would give an owner a comparative basis for understanding the condition of the subject building vs. the condition of others within the use type (critical facilities) or construction type (wood, concrete, steel, etc.).