Worldwide, a large percentage of school and hospital buildings in areas of high seismicity, constructed of unreinforced masonry or non-ductile concrete, have been vulnerable to damage from earthquake and have suffered disproportional damage and collapse resulting in loss of life and in particular injuries and fatalities.. The performance of school buildings in past earthquakes has typically been worse than typical residential and commercial buildings which is in contrast of what the population believed before the event. To address seismic vulnerability of public and school buildings, the World Bank has initiated several projects in the past decade assessing seismic vulnerability in several vulnerable and heavily populated locations such as Istanbul, Philippines, and Haiti. These programs follow a national-international partnership and are comprised of several components including: a) seismic vulnerability assessment, b) prioritization and cost-benefit analysis, c) development of seismic retrofit guidelines, d) emergency preparedness planning, e) stakeholder communication management, and f) seismic retrofit implementation. As a corollary to such programs, it is expected that the overall level of technical expertise in both design and construction sectors will be enhanced and thus result in construction of better buildings besides schools. A successful application of such a World Bank project is the seismic retrofitting of public school buildings in Istanbul. The government of Istanbul, under the auspices of the World Bank has developed the Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project, with the main objective of providing life safety performance for as many buildings as possible under the available funding. As part of the project, a comprehensive seismic assessment and retrofit guideline was developed by national engineers and international experts. Extensive, multi-layer design reviews and construction inspections are conducted. To date, over 1500 buildings have been retrofitted and the effort is on-going. The success of Istanbul project has resulted in similar programs being considered elsewhere and using the Istanbul project as a template. In Metro Manila currently data is being collected and both a seismic retrofit guideline and a state of art prioritization methodology have been developed. In the next phase the first batch of 200 buildings considered most vulnerable are slated for more in-depth investigation and seismic retrofit.
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