Developing an Integrated System for Seismic Risk Analysis of Critical Hospital Facilities

This paper describes an approach used to develop retrofit strategies for hospitals and other critical facilities in low to moderate seismic hazard zones, where strong earthquakes are infrequent, but if they should occur, the consequences would be high. Hospitals in New York State and other urban centers in the eastern U.S. fall into this category, where seismic retrofit requires information on the impact of losing medical services after a destructive earthquake. A team of MCEER researchers is currently developing an approach to address this task. It is a truly multidisciplinary effort, with team members from a variety of disciplines including engineering, seismology, structural dynamics, risk and reliability analysis, manufacturing process engineering, computer simulation, urban and regional planning, and economics. When this research task is completed, it will be united with MCEER’s general hospital project to develop seismic retrofit strategies.