The recent hurricanes in the United States and earthquakes occurring elsewhere have highlighted the vulnerabilities of existing residential construction. This is especially true for those structures built several decades ago when the building code requirements were not as responsive to mitigating damage from natural hazards. Low-rise wood-framed and masonry structures are among the most commonly damaged structure types during extreme design events. Reliability-based risk assessment of these structure types under as-built and retrofitted conditions is essential for sound risk management decisions to be made. The intent of the proposed research effort is to generate and acquire data through field testing and analyses pertaining to various critical capacities of structural roof elements/systems of residential buildings. Forty-four (44) low-rise residential buildings on the campus of Clemson University will be demolished, providing a limited, time-critical opportunity to evaluate as-built resistance of wood framed/ masonry structures. This opportunity also allows for the evaluation of resistance of retrofitted wood framed structures. The specific objectives of this research include the collection and analysis of roof-to-wall connection capacities in aged structures. These capacities are to be assessed for both as-built and retrofitted conditions. Additionally, the uplift capacity of roof sheathing panels will also be assessed. Experimental tests will be designed to provide sufficient data to permit statistical inferences. Hysteretic behavior of the connections will also be assessed with the end product being proposed equivalent analytical models.
