The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Seismic safety of existing buildings and incentives for hazard mitigation in San Francisco: an exploratory study

Meltsner, Arnold J.

UCB/EERC-77/28, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1977-12, 83 pages (770/M4/1977)

The seismic safety of existing buildings is not solely a matter of engineering design and assessment of seismological risk. Within any community there are likely to be different perceptions of the public interest. It seems clear that what is needed, in addition to engineering studies to develop appropriate procedures for evaluating and coping with the hazard from existing buildings, is knowledge about the range of appropriate incentives which might prove useful for governments to use to facilitate implementation of these procedures. The main purpose of this report is to document an exploratory study of a number of possible incentives and options which have been discussed in the past by public officials and conceivably might be adopted in the future.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-77-28.pdf (9 MB)