Resilience Criteria for Seismic Evaluation of Existing Buildings: A Proposal to Supplement ASCE 31 for Intermediate Performance Objectives

Earthquake resilience, the ability to respond to and recover from a damaging event, is gaining currency as a performance metric even for non-“essential” facilities. Resilience can be measured as the time needed to restore basic operations. Yet our standards for seismic evaluation do not explicitly address recovery time. This paper proposes new evaluation criteria to address questions of resilience. The proposed criteria will help distinguish and prioritize likely seismic deficiencies, grouping them by their impact on recovery time. The criteria use the standard known as ASCE 31 as a platform, building on its procedures and terminology and extending its use to resilience planning. WHAT IS RESILIENCE?