Resilience is the ability to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption, or the capacity to withstand, recover from, or adapt to stress, misfortune, or change. By now, design teams are at least accustomed to considering this concept and a building’s response to such hazards as flooding, intense wind, and drought. You might assume that for one threat in particular—earthquakes—modern codes assure resilience, essentially guaranteeing that recently built structures can be quickly reoccupied, or at least readily repaired. It sounds totally reasonable—right? But that is not the case. Codes were devised to protect lives, not property, so they do little to limit the kind of destruction that might make a building uninhabitable for an extended period of time or even necessitate demolition. In fact, recent studies often quoted in engineering circles estimate that code-compliant buildings could suffer two years of downtime after a significant quake. “By design, codes focus only on safety, and therefore tolerate lots of damage,” says David Mar, partner at Berkeley, Californiabased Mar Structural Design.
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