Overview of the Bridging Guidelines for the Seismic Retrofit of BC Schools

In 2004, the Province of British Columbia, on the West Coast of Canada, announced a 10-15 year, $1.5 billion seismic retrofit program for the province's 750 at-risk public schools. The purpose of this earthquake preparedness initiative is to accelerate the upgrading of school public safety in the moderate and high seismicity regions of the province. Given the magnitude of the mitigation program, the province’s Ministry of Education and the federal agency Western Economic Diversification Canada made a commitment to support the development of state-ofthe-art performance-based seismic engineering technology for achieving optimum safety within a cost-effective mitigation framework, which could not be achieved based on current practice. This paper gives an overview of the formulation of performance-based structural assessment and retrofit design guidelines, which are currently being used by engineers to determine retrofit strategies for schools in British Columbia.