Report Cards for Buildings: A Proposed Rating System for Earthquake Performance

摘要

How will my building respond in an earthquake? Will it be safe? Will 1 be inconvenienced? How long until it is back to normal? How much better would my building be with a seismic upgrade? Get a sneak preview of a system under development by the Northern California chapter's Existing Building Committee (Building Ratings Subcommittee), which will rate a building's earthquake response relative to other comparable buildings. Savvy owners and tenants in earthquake country want to know their seismic risk. Although a typical engineering report can provide technical information for a single building, there is an unmet need for qualitative information to compare seismic performance among multiple buildings, and use this information to decide where to locate (or whether to strengthen). Like other rating systems customarily used in transactions, such as the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) method of rating office space, SEAONC's Earthquake Performance Rating is proposed to be strictly voluntary, and presented so that its meaning is easily grasped by non-technical stakeholders, providing a common vocabulary of seismic risk. The Earthquake Performance Rating system is in the testing phase of development. Early feedback from potential users, including conference participants, is essential for delivering a system that is credible, workable, and informative. This paper contains the subcommittee's Summary of Phase 1, released in January 2008, which is the only document that has been fully vetted through the parent committee.