MCEER’s vision on the seismic resilience of health care facilities

The concept of seismic resilience needs a quantitative evaluation. The evaluation suggested in this paper is based on nondimensional analytical functions related to variations of losses within a specified “recovery period”. The resilience refers to both direct and indirect losses. The path to recovery usually depends on available resources and may take different shapes, which can be estimated by proper recovery functions. The loss functions have major uncertainties due to the uncertain nature of the earthquake and structural behavior as well as due to uncertain description of functionality limits. Therefore, losses can be described as functions of fragility of systems’ components. Fragility curves can be determined using multidimensional performance limit thresholds, which allow considering simultaneously different mechanical-physical variables such as forces, velocities, displacements and accelerations along with other functional limits. A procedure, which defines resilience as function of losses and loss recovery based on multidimensional system fragility, is formulated and an example is presented for a typical California hospital.