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Resilient Design News For You
Newsletter Volume 5 No. 1 - March 2022
Greetings, Resilience Ally!

USRC believes that building performance rating systems are a vital tool for enabling and accelerating the changes in construction and financial practices that the world needs now, to better protect ourselves from earthquakes and other natural hazard risks.

Plenty of green building rating systems exist that focus on the energy and environmental aspect of sustainability, but structural safety and vulnerability to calamitous events are neglected points, says a recent scientific review. USRC-Earthquake and soon our Wind system are advancing to fill those gaps by addressing damage potential and post-natural hazard event functionality. Furthermore, USRC's rating systems continuously strengthen with new developments in resilience research and modelling.

Read on below to find out about a new Functional Recovery (FR) estimation method that empowers engineers to deliver better seismic resilience outcomes for their clients. Resilience-savvy government leaders, corporate risk managers, investors, and commercial and industrial owners should be asking their staff, design consultants, and local building officials whether this method can help their organization's core missions and bottom line.
Sincerely,

Evan Reis, SE
USRC Executive Director and Co-Founder
New in the Resilient Design Field
ATC-138 Functional Recovery Method Empowers Engineers, Owners with Better Building Performance Information

US Resiliency Council applauds the recent announcement of the ATC-138 Functional Recovery (Beta) Method developed by the Applied Technology Council (ATC), an SP3 Team, and researchers at Colorado University at Boulder. “This new method is a vital improvement to current practice for quantification of post-earthquake building recovery time and to support due-diligence studies and resilient design and retrofit of new and existing buildings.” says Curt Haselton, CEO of the SP3 Team.
USRC Certified Rating Professionals (CRPs) can use this method to produce even more comprehensive estimates of functional recovery outcomes for their clients when calculating either a USRC Transactional or Verified Rating. ATC-138 enables enhanced seismic risk assessment of existing buildings for due diligence studies for owners and investors are concerned not just about building repair costs, but also downtime and business interruption losses. 

With such estimates in hand, design teams and owners can better understand the full stream of benefits they can realize by investing in higher performing structures or upgrading older ones. Functional recovery information also helps policymakers, business leaders, and the public see why improving building performance for earthquakes is in everybody’s best interest. Essential community functions will be compromised if we don't incentivize and invest more in resilience now.
Building and infrastructure damage forced local TV stations off the air in a 2018, magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Anchorage, AK. This CBS-affiliate newsroom was flooded and the ceiling caved in.
With funding from FEMA and in partnership with NIST, the ATC-138 project team devoted three years to creating this next-generation method. Building on the FEMA P-58 building-specific seismic risk assessment framework, damage estimates are broken down by individual aspects of a building’s overall design, enabling an engineer to see how specific component-level design decisions affect building recovery time. This information can be used to check whether new buildings satisfy functional recovery goals, assess recovery time for existing buildings, or assess the benefits of retrofits for existing buildings.

USRC’s earthquake rating system will be strengthened as CRP's start using the ATC-138 methodology. The method is open-source and already integrated in SP3-RiskModel for assessment of individual buildings and SP3-Portfolio for assessing community-level resilience or specific sets of buildings for a particular owner, institution, or investor. Since the method is currently in Beta-release, engineering practitioners and USRC CRP’s are invited to reach out to the development team (Dr. Curt Haselton or[Dr. Abbie Liel) for more information on using this next-generation approach.
Resilient Design Education
COMING SOON! Health, Safety, and Welfare Learning Unit Courses for Architects

USRC has converted the breakthrough Resilience Advantage series into on-demand courses soon available for American Institute of Architects Learning Units and other professional development credits. Through this initiative, even more design professionals can additionally benefit from the Optimum Seismic-sponsored virtual education about the benefits of resilient design.
Opportunities
12th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Salt Lake City, Utah, June 27- July 1, 2022.

The U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering is hosted by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) every 4 years in conjunction with federal and local partners. This year's theme is Reimagining Risk and Resilience. USRC will be presenting on its E4 Principle: Engineering in service of Equity, the Economy, and our Environment, among dozens of other valuable scientific and practitioner sessions and workshops with leaders in the field.
From the USRC Blog

By Michael Cochran, SE
Vice President at Thornton Tomasetti, USRC Board 2016-2021
Become a Member
The USRC improves community resilience by establishing and implementing credible and consistent rating systems that measure expected building performance in natural hazard events.

We also certify expert structural engineers as USRC Rating Professionals and inform broad audiences on the societal importance of building performance and cost-effective opportunities to improve it.
Case studies of USRC-rated structures, information on how to become a certified USRC Rater, and how to inquire about rating a building rating are available at www.USRC.org.