Functional recovery

Functional recovery is a new objective for the design of buildings and infrastructure to enable faster recovery after earthquakes. This performance objective targets recovery timeframes that produce return of critical basic functions and services that can lessen damage, downtime, repair costs, and other negative societal outcomes. Communities across the U.S. are unprepared for the significant and long-term impacts produced by earthquakes, and the development of functional recovery design provides an opportunity to advance future resilience via codes, standards, guidelines, and best practices. 

NIST has been at the forefront of functional recovery development for buildings (both structural and nonstructural systems) and lifelines infrastructure since receiving a Congressional request in 2018 to work on this problem. We prioritize technical research in engineering design and practice, development of frameworks for decision-making, and social science research methodologies to identify appropriate target recovery times that advance functional recovery performance objective development.