Preliminary Seismic Evaluation Table for Typical Buildings in Primary and Secondary Schools

Lack of seismic performance is a common problem for the buildings in primary and secondary school in Taiwan. Serious casualties and losses may be resulted from the collapse of school buildings under strong earthquake. Furthermore, school buildings are usually assigned as emergency shelter soon after earthquake. Therefore, an economic and efficient table for preliminary seismic evaluation of typical school buildings is proposed based on the common structural types, seismic weaknesses, failure modes and experimental data. It is used to grade the seismic performance of school buildings. The seismic performance of 26 school buildings selected from seven counties or cities in the north, central and southern Taiwan were evaluated with the proposed table to study the feasibility of the proposed method. Meanwhile, detailed seismic evaluation was also carried out for those buildings where design information was available in order to verify the accuracy of the results from preliminary seismic evaluation by filling tables. Good agreement was obtained from the comparison of preliminary and detailed evaluation results.