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Residential Buildings Committee
News
- Chapter members David Bonowitz, Jeanne Perkins, and Tom Tobin discussed “tuckunder” buildings and their seismic risks at a Berkeley Soft Story Forum on Feb 24, 2005. Press related to the event drew on our Soft Story Fact Sheet. Berkeley is currently developing a soft story risk reduction program.
- Assemblymember Loni Hancock of Berkeley has introduced a spot bill, AB 304, that will authorize local jurisdictions to adopt soft story retrofit standards from the International Existing Buildings Code. The Structural Engineers Association of California has produced a commentary on the 2003 edition of that code, and the 2006 edition will include revisions based on the SEAOC work.
- Prescriptive plans now available (Nov 2004). Under the leadership of Chapter member William Schock, a joint committee of the East Bay, Peninsula, and Monterey Bay chapters of the International Code Council (ICC) has published prescriptive plans for strengthening cripple wall houses. "Prescriptive" plans are pre-designed to avoid costly building-specific details and engineering calculations and can therefore be implemented directly by contractors or even by do-it-yourself homeowners. The plans are posted at http://quake.abag.ca.gov/fixit/plansets.html.
Facts about Bay Area residential buildings
- Only about 1 in 10 of the Bay Area's older houses have been strengthened to remain habitable after a "design-level" earthquake.
- About half a million Bay Area residents live in earthquake-vulnerable "soft-story" buildings.
See all the Fact Sheets here.
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