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

In 2004, the Province of British Columbia (B.C.) announced a 10–15 year, $1.5 billion seismic retrofit program for the province’s 750 at-risk public schools. The purpose of this program is to quantify the seismic risk of the provinces school buildings and to expedite the seismic upgrading of the most at-risk schools. In order to provide a safe and cost effective implementation of this program, the Association of Professional Engineers of British Columbia (APEGBC), in collaboration with the University of British Columbia (UBC), has developed a performance-based probabilistic method and guidelines for the seismic risk assessment and retrofit of low-rise buildings. The guidelines: the Seismic Retrofit Guidelines, (SRG), are currently moving towards their 3^rd edition, to be published in 2016. This paper summarizes the current state of the province-wide retrofit program and introduces the performance based methodology that has been used to assess and retrofit school blocks. Some of the methodology changes that will be implemented in SRG3 are also introduced. These changes include revisions to the seismic hazard, a new ground motion selection and scaling procedure, and new retrofit prototypes and modeling approaches.