Building damage & repair

News and Updates

Horizontal concrete slab is visible in a forest of scaffolding and equipment in a large indoor space.

Champlain Towers South Investigation Team Provides Update to Structural Engineers

April 11, 2025

This outreach will help ensure that the team’s findings and recommendations lead to improvements to codes, standards and practices that can prevent similar

NIST Report to Congress Provides Update on Champlain Towers South Investigation

February 5, 2025

The report notes that the team has completed all experimental work on the physical evidence from the building’s structural elements.

NIST Earthquake Engineering Group Members Conduct a Preliminary Earthquake Reconnaissance Mission to Turkey

August 31, 2023

In the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, a M W 7.8 earthquake occurred in Turkey, followed by four additional earthquakes throughout the day with MW of 5

Blog Posts

A man in safety gear crouches to examine a damaged wall inside a building after an earthquake.

The Highs and Lows of Studying the Aftermath of One of Turkey’s Deadliest Earthquakes

How My Childhood Fascination With Bridges Helped Me Build a Career Protecting People and Buildings From Natural Disasters

Hurricane Maria Recollections, Software Nostalgia, The Brothers Engineering: A Sample of Stories on NIST Social Media

Projects and Programs

Functional Recovery of Buildings and Lifelines

Ongoing

Objective The Functional Recovery project is designed to improve the time for recovery of key social functions by strengthening the built environment to withstand earthquake impacts. Our efforts will advance measurement science for the assessment and design of buildings and lifelines, contribute in

Hierarchical Materials

Ongoing

The STG develops the methods and metrology that will lead to the understanding of the structure-property relationships of hierarchical composites in real medical PPE or protective applications, which heretofore has been lacking. This work establishes in situ monitoring of advanced manufacturing

Building-Level Seismic Performance Assessment

Ongoing

Objective The objective of this project is to better understand the seismic performance of buildings designed in areas of medium-to-high seismicity and to identify and evaluate ways to enhance the seismic performance of buildings through advances in design approaches, including conventional and low

Assessing Pyrrhotite in Concrete

Ongoing

Objective Develop a standard test method and a set of calibration reference materials to quantify pyrrhotite in concrete; document pyrrhotite/aggregate/concrete reactions and rates so that the most deleterious reactions can be efficiently reduced or eliminated; and evaluate proposed mitigation

Publications

A Technical Framework to Map Functional Recovery Performance Objectives to Prescriptive Seismic Design Provisions for Buildings

September 19, 2024

Author(s)

Dustin Cook, Siamak Sattar

Designing buildings for improved functional recovery represents a major shift in the current design paradigm. Given the novelty of the functional recovery

FEMA P-58 RESILIENCE ANALYSIS OF BUILDING PORTFOLIOS CONSIDERING GROUND MOTION CORRELATIONS

July 9, 2024

Author(s)

Jack Baker, Curtis Haselton, Ed Almeter, Dustin Cook

Evaluating the Variability in Functional Recovery Performance of Modern Buildings Across the United States

July 9, 2024

Author(s)

Kristen Blowes, Carlos Molina-Hutt, Dustin Cook

As building codes in the United States move toward the development of functional recovery provisions aimed at reducing recovery times following earthquakes, it

Functional Recovery in Modern Reinforced Concrete Buildings

July 5, 2024

Author(s)

Dustin Cook, ABBIE LIEL, Amir Safiey

In the field of structural engineering, functional recovery is a new, but non-standardized building design objective intended to improve a building's capacity