Potential for Achieving Post-Disaster Functional Recovery for Existing Buildings: Lessons from Earthquakes for Other Hazards

This paper describes a study that assesses the functional recovery performance of existing buildings in earthquakes, exploring opportunities to improve post-earthquake building function through seismic retrofit. The results show that life safety retrofits can significantly improve functional recovery, but also may not. Rather, direct consideration of building function can be used to identify retrofit solutions that lower function disruption as well as life safety risks. The paper also describes qualitative research conducted to define the barriers and opportunities to achieving functional recovery seismic performance for existing buildings. The barriers include costs and a lack of guidelines to inform building design for functional recovery. However, functional recovery goals have significant alignment with sustainability upgrades and other owners’ goals, presenting an opportunity. These barriers and opportunities provide insights into research needs and changes in building practices that can support functional recovery after climate hazard events, which are described in the final section.