The U.S. Resiliency Council®: Building Ratings and Community Resilience Implementation Issues

摘要

The notion that there is a disconnect between the anticipated performance of buildings in a major earthquake, and what the public understands or expects, is not new. The thought was that if the public could be made more aware of their potential seismic risk, they could be expected to make better-informed decisions on owning and leasing properties, and market forces would eventually drive the building design, management, and procurement process into more resilient seismic design. Measuring and improving the resiliency of the country's communities is a national imperative, and there are a number of major efforts in progress to address this issue. What all of these initiatives have in common is the need to understand the performance of the building stock in a community in terms of safety and recovery. The United States Resiliency Council (USRC) is modeled after the U.S. Green Buildings Council (USGBC®). Like the USGBC, the USRC will certify practitioners and technically review ratings shared with the public so that USRC ratings are credible and consistent. The USRC was officially launched on December 1, 2015. The USRC offers the structural engineering profession a unique opportunity to be a major player in the new resilience efforts and to better communicate with both clients and the public about the performance of buildings we design and retrofit. This paper will overview some of the resilience initiatives that are in progress and will focus on the importance of the USRC building rating system in these bigger picture initiatives. It will also outline the USRC outreach efforts underway to begin the implementation of the rating system. With current assessment tools such as FEMA 154, Rapid Visual Screening of Buildings for Potential Seismic Hazards: A Handbook, Second Edition (FEMA, 2002); ASCE 31, Seismic Evaluation of Existing Buildings (ASCE, 2003); ASCE 41, Seismic Rehabilitation of Existing Buildings (ASCE, 2014); and FEMA P-58, Next-Generation Performance Assessment of Buildings (assessment procedures newly released), the concept of a new system to rate the performance of buildings would seem unnecessary, or at least redundant. Although they would be key inputs to a building rating system, currently available tools alone cannot do what a comprehensive rating system would do: 1. Communicate levels of performance to broad-based, nontechnical audiences 2. Address new and existing buildings in a consistent context 3. Correct popular misconceptions about expected building performance 4. Provide multiple measures of performance to suit different decision-making needs 5. Provide a context for public policy decisions and market forces to encourage and reward better performing designs 6. Provide the critical information on the performance of a communities building stock for the broader resilience developments that are in progress Currently available tools have reached level of sophistication and maturity that we now feel capable of distilling complex measures of performance into meaningful sound-bite information that is expected to be useful to owners, developers, tenants, lenders, and insurers in their building procurement transactions.