Seismic response of hospitals at different scales

Abstract

Nowadays, natural disasters are more frequents and destructives compared to the past, causing many deaths and injuries. Existing hospitals are defined essential structures that have the goal to protect the public health of citizen. They are called to resist not only to the impact of a disaster, but also to be operational in that case. Operational means that all the components of a health facility such as structures, architectural elements, contents, lifelines, key staff and the whole organizational system have to be functional. That objective is a challenge for the existing structures, especially for those built with obsolete seismic codes and in high seismic hazard areas like Lima. Furthermore, in case of an emergency, health facilities are called to response as a network in order to be more efficient and resilient. It implies that hospitals have to be managed not only at small-scale referring to the single hospital, but also at large-scale referring to the whole health system composed by all the health facilities involved in a determined area. Transfer of patients, staffs, water and medicines, can be moved under the coordination of a headquarters in this way. Starting from a developed health sector contingency plan in case of earthquakes for Lima metropolitan area, an assessment of the seismic performance of health facilities at large and small scale was carried out. At large-scale, two exploratory models were developed. The first one adapts to evaluate the basic seismic response capacity of hospitals, while the second one useful to assess the hospital treatment capacity of health facilities in the aftermath of a seismic event. Both models were carried out considering structural and nonstructural building damages using fragility curves provided by international standards, given the lack of Peruvian curves. Both models were proposed for a case study of 41 hospitals in Lima metropolitan. Given the lack of data about Peruvian building fragility curves, for a high rise infilled reinforced concrete hospital building, fragility curves were developed through the capacity spectrum approach including record-to-record variability. The method also allowed to to assess at small-scale the seismic structural performance of the investigate hospital building using the capacity analysis method.