Cost Estimates for the Seismic Retrofit of Federally Owned and Leased Buildings

Published

June 25, 2018

Author(s)

Juan F. Fung, David T. Butry, Siamak Sattar, Steven L. McCabe

Abstract

Presidential Executive Order 13717, Establishing a Federal Earthquake Risk Management Standard, encourages federal agencies to “enhance resilience…[to] future earthquakes” by evaluating and retrofitting existing federal buildings based on current existing building codes. We develop a methodology for predicting seismic retrofit costs based on observable building characteristics and the desired performance standard. Our approach is to train a series of regression models on a database collected for FEMA 156, Typical Costs for the Seismic Rehabilitation of Existing Buildings. The models vary in the level of data required; e.g., a decision-maker may not have information on building construction type. We use prediction error to quantify the effect of data availability on estimates.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 11th National Conference in Earthquake Engineering

Conference Dates

June 25-29, 2018

Conference Location

Los Angeles, CA

Conference Title

Eleventh US National Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Pub Type

Conferences

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Citation

Fung, J. , Butry, D. , Sattar, S. and McCabe, S. (2018), Cost Estimates for the Seismic Retrofit of Federally Owned and Leased Buildings, Proceedings of the 11th National Conference in Earthquake Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=924676 (Accessed October 8, 2025)