SEIMIC RETROFIT PROGRAM FOR TAIWAN SCHOOL BUILDINGS AFTER 1999 CHI-CHI EARTHQUAKE

摘要

Based on the observations made after several major earthquakes occurred in Taiwan, school building has been found most vulnerable to severe earthquake damage among all building types. Although the seismic design force for school buildings has been 25% higher than the ordinary buildings, its performance to resist strong earthquake has been proved insufficient. Serious casualties and losses may be resulted from the collapse of school buildings under strong earthquake. Furthermore, school buildings are usually required to serve as emergency shelter soon after a major earthquake. The urgent need of seismic performance evaluation and enhancement works is evident. Lack of integral planning, lack of seismic resistance along corridors, effects of short columns, embedded pipelines and lack of lateral reinforcement has been found the key factors responsible for the collapse of school buildings. A three-stage strategy for seismic evaluation and retrofit of existing low-rise reinforced concrete school buildings has been proposed. It is based on the common structural types, seismic resistance, possible failure modes and available experimental data. Seismic-deficient school buildings are being retrofitted based on the performance index introduced in this paper.