Multi-Hazard Design of a New Emergency Communications Facility in St. Louis, Missouri

The recently constructed St. Louis County Emergency Communications Center was designed to consider multiple natural and manmade hazards in an effort to provide a facility that would be able to withstand a significant extreme event and still maintain the level of operability required to provide both emergency communications and post disaster response for St. Louis County. St. Louis County recognized that having an emergency response facility that is fully operable after an extreme event is one key aspect to promoting community resilience. The communications center was designed in accordance with the 2009 International Building Code (IBC), as adopted by St. Louis County, supplemented by other relevant design standards. The natural hazards for which the building was designed included elevated seismic loads as well as extreme wind loads. The prescribed manmade hazards reflected the requirement to provide a level of anti-terrorism/force protection (AT/FP) that is commensurate with the function and importance of the facility. This paper will examine both the development of the design criteria and integration of the different conventional and extreme load criteria into a cohesive multi-hazard strategy to provide a higher level of protection for both structural and non-structural elements that were deemed to be critical to the post-event operations of the facility.