Comparison of resilience rating systems: Assessing post-earthquake hospital functionality

A community's ability to recover from an earthquake is heavily tied to the overall resilience of that community. Damage to critical infrastructure can dictate how the community as a whole recovers. Efforts have been made to quantify the resilience of important infrastructure components of a community, i.e., individual buildings. These resilience frameworks aim to predict damage, life safety concerns, and recovery times and cost. Several rating systems have been developed to help stakeholders assess vulnerabilities in their buildings and address specific areas for improvement. Each rating system has a different way of quantifying resilience, however, they have a common goal of reducing the adverse effects of a disaster and keep critical facilities running. Hospitals are critical to a community's well being, and contribute to their resilience and ability to recover following an earthquake. Physical damage to structural and nonstructural components in a hospital can severely limit the ability of the hospital to provide critical life saving services to the community. Predicting post-earthquake hospital functionality is critical for planning and preparing for future earthquakes. Rating systems provide valuable information on the predicted performance of these critical facilities. The results of three different rating systems are compared for a single hospital building.