Seismic Loss and Downtime Estimates of Existing Tall Buildings and Strategies for Increased Resilience

Tall buildings play an important role in the socio-economic activity of major metropolitan areas. The resilience of these structures is critical to ensure a successful recovery after major disasters. Events such as the Canterbury earthquake in 2011 have highlighted the impact of poor performing buildings on the business continuity of downtown districts, where tall buildings are typically clustered together. Following the 2011 earthquake, Christchurch’s Central Business District (CBD) red zone covered a significant area of the city and more than 60% of the businesses were displaced (CERC 2012). Until the introduction of Performance Based Seismic Design (PBSD) in the 1990s, buildings were designed using conventional building codes, which follow a prescriptive force-based approach based on the first mode translational response of the structure (FEMA 2006). Researchers and engineers have raised concerns that the prescriptive approach of building codes is not suitable for tall building design due to the significant contribution of higher mode effects (PEER 2010a). As a result of these shortcomings, several jurisdictions in areas of high seismicity throughout the Unites States (e.g. Los Angeles and San Francisco) have adopted a PBSD approach for the design of new tall buildings. While new designs follow a more adequate approach, little is known about the seismic performance of older existing tall buildings that were designed prior to the adoption of PBSD (Almufti et al. 2012). This paper presents an assessment of the seismic performance of existing tall buildings in a case study city, San Francisco, where an archetype tall building is designed based on an inventory of the existing tall building stock. Non-Linear Response History Analysis (NLRHA) are conducted with ground motions representative of the design earthquake hazard level defined in current building codes, with explicit consideration of near-fault directivity effects. In order to influence decision making, performance is reported as the expected consequences in terms of direct economic losses and downtime. Once the performance of the archetype building is assessed, a range of structural and nonstructural enhancements are explored for enhanced performance as well as mitigation measures for increased resilience. Expected direct economic losses for the archetype building are in the order of 34% of building cost and downtime estimates for functional recovery are 87 weeks. The strategies presented in this paper enable up to a 92% reduction in losses and minimize downtime for functional recovery to 1 day