Developing Regional Building Inventories: Lessons from the Field

Abstract

Between 2008 and 2011 members of the Concrete Coalition completed numerous building inventories of California cities to assemble a database of California pre-1980 concrete buildings. Inventory collectors used a variety of data sources ranging from county assessors' files to Sanborn maps and satellite images. Sidewalk surveys were used to corroborate data collected from multiple sources, and a regression model was developed to extrapolate data to cities where detailed inventory collection was not possible. Lessons drawn from the inventories of three cities—Alameda, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—indicate that no single approach can be recommended, but instead, the approach depends on many things, including city size, building stock, available budget, available data, and the availability and experience of human resources. Regardless of approach, inventory data is a valuable resource for developing loss estimates and policy recommendations.

Resilience by Design: Bringing Science to Policy Makers

“…The collapse of the new Olive View Hospital in the San Fernando earthquake of 1971 showed the fragility of nonductile reinforced concrete buildings, but only the buildings that received the strong shaking in the northern San Fernando Valley were damaged and removed (Benfer and Coffman, 1974). An estimated 1400 similar buildings remain elsewhere in the city (Anagnos et al, 2012). The 1994 earthquake revealed the problems with soft-first story construction with the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments and the loss of 49,000 housing units (Public Policy Institute of California, 2006), but an estimated 14,000 buildings of this type still exist in the city.…”

Earthquake Loss Estimates and Policy Implications for Nonductile Concrete Buildings in Los Angeles

“…We developed an inventory of pre-1976 concrete buildings in the City of Los Angeles to provide a database for investigating the age, size, use, and location of typical buildings and to support loss estimates comparing retrofitted and non-retrofitted scenarios (Anagnos et al 2008(Anagnos et al , 2010(Anagnos et al , 2012Comerio and Anagnos 2012). The approach was similar to previous work undertaken by Comerio (1992Comerio ( , 2000aComerio ( , 2000bComerio ( , 2000c.…”

“…Numerous papers have described the background and interim findings. The Grand Challenge research project undertaken from 2007 to 2013 included a case study inventory in the City of Los Angeles for loss modeling (Anagnos et al 2008(Anagnos et al , 2010(Anagnos et al , 2012Comerio and Anagnos 2012), extensive experimental laboratory testing of components (Hassan and Moehle 2012, Henkhaus et al 2013, Prasad and Hutchinson 2014, and analytical simulations of ground motions, progressive collapse analyses, and building fragility studies (Star et al 2011, Park and Mosalam 2012, Galanis and Moehle 2015. During this same period, other investigators inventoried these buildings (Comartin et al 2011), studied their performance (Lynch et al 2011, Wu et al 2009, estimated earthquake losses (Baradaran Shoraka et al 2013, Jones et al 2008, Taciroglu and Khalili-Tehrani 2008, and evaluated mitigation strategies (Koutromanos et al 2013;Deierlein 2012, 2013).…”

Analysis of Cool Roof Coatings for Residential Demand Side Management in Tropical Australia

“…Conclusion #2: Networks may benefit from participating in the development of detailed and accurate regional building files [22] utilizing existing simulated data, and Agent Based Models that enable simulation of different scenarios and tailored solutions for subareas of the network [23,24]. This work is in its infancy and its full potential has yet to be explored.…”