Background
A series of initial discussions among engineers, building officials, and other individuals with an interest in dangers posed by nonductile concrete buildings took place in early 2006 in both Southern and Northern California, as well as the Pacific Northwest. These meetings confirmed a strong consensus in favor of a volunteer coalition with roots in the technical community to address challenges posed by nonductile concrete buildings. Participants also uniformly recognized the participation of non-technical stakeholders (e.g. building owners and managers, planners, economists, sociologists, public policy interests) as absolutely essential to the effort. Following these meetings, a Senior Advisory Panel was formed to begin to formulate a plan and objectives for the Concrete Coalition. The results of these initial discussions are summarized below:
- The Concrete Coalition needs to establish a position of strong leadership. This means defining the problems and advocating for the development of practical solutions.
- Quantification of the problem in terms of deaths, dollars, and downtime is an important early objective.
- Successful risk reduction efforts result from strong community action. Engineers and building officials cannot succeed without gaining the trust and support of our communities.
- The primary focus of the Concrete Coalition will be collapse prevention. Existing standards for evaluation and retrofit design require further development to be capable of identifying truly dangerous buildings.
- There are significant successes out there. Several universities have made great progress in reducing risks associated with their concrete buildings. The life safety risk due to earthquakes on the UC Berkeley campus has been cut in half in less than ten years.
- There are dangerous buildings that are not concrete. However, older concrete buildings pose unique challenges and deserve the sole focus of the Concrete Coalition.
- There are unsafe concrete buildings in virtually all seismically active regions of the United States.
- Efforts are being coordinated with international initiatives.
