This is a post Loma Prieta earthquake (Oct. 1989) investigation project in learning from this damaging event. The thrust of this project is to evaluate the performance of university buildings located at the campus of the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) from the damage observations and seismic behavior analysis. The UCSF campus has gradually grown over the years to now encompass 80 buildings located throughout San Francisco. As such the campus exhibits a wide range of building types and standards and, in addition, strong motion records are available for this site from the California Division of Mines and Geology, thus making it ideally suited for this evaluation. Several buildings of different types will be chosen for detailed evaluations. Evaluation methods from the Applied Technology Council ATC-14 document will be employed to perform consistent, realistic, cost effective assessments of the performance during the Loma Prieta earthquake of the existing buildings against their standards of record. Observed damage, causes of any failures, likely building responses, actual and potential life-safety hazards, and capacity/demand margins for the Loma Prieta and future earthquakes with respect to UCSF buildings will be identified and discussed. These findings will be extended to behavior of university buildings in general with respect to their standard code of record in a final report to be issued at project completion. The building stock of a variety of construction types and ages will enable the seismic performance of older buildings be evaluated and the associated generic potential life-safety hazards be rectified.
