Resilience by design: Improving hospital functionality following earthquake

Abstract

Earthquakes can cause extensive damage to the built environment and can led to injury of people in the affected area. It is critical that hospitals continue to remain functional following an earthquake in order to provide necessary treatment of the injured and ongoing treatment of those already in the hospital. However, current design codes aim for life safety goals and do not guarantee that buildings will remain operational following a major earthquake. This poster examines the operability and functionality of a hospital following a major earthquake by extending the performance-based earthquake design framework to a resilience-based design framework that considers the operability and functionality of hospital systems in addition to the performance of the building. Structural and non-structural damage is linked to specific hospital services through a fault tree analysis to estimate operability of individual hospital services and the overall functionality of the hospital as a whole. Hospital functionality can be plotted as a resilience curve to visualize the restoration of hospital services over time.