Seismic vulnerability assessment of all secondary public school buildings in the City of Manila using rapid visual screening

ABSTRACT: Safety is always the top priority of engineers, and it is expected for structures to experience damage when a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, hits. Given that school buildings are one of the important infrastructures needed to function and they also provide emergency aid or an evacuation area for the community, it is important to assess their seismic vulnerability. Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) is an effective method used to assess vertical buildings and this study utilizes this procedure to assess Manila’s secondary public-school buildings. Prior to the conduct of RVS, obtaining permits for legal access of the school buildings was required, as well as undergoing learning sessions about the RVS procedures from professionals. For the RVS procedure, the form adapted to Google Forms was filled up with necessary building information to obtain the RVS Scores. After collecting necessary data for all the public secondary school buildings, the data was then transferred to spreadsheets to sort the gathered data, and for the computation of the RVS and the DPWH Prioritization scores. Out of the 184 buildings assessed, 69 buildings or 37.5% were deemed to have seismic vulnerability due to not passing the required RVS Score and is required to have detailed inspection done by professionals, while the remaining 115 buildings or 62.5% are subjected to low seismic vulnerability since they are newly built and aligned to the latest typical design of public school buildings.

Filipiniana