A Post-Disaster Functional Asset Value Index for School Buildings

School buildings must be resilient during hazardous events like earthquakes so that the important functions of the school will not be affected. During disasters, schools have an added value and important function in post-disaster activities. Schools are often used as evacuation centers. When schools are damaged, the school’s mission of continuous delivery of education will be disrupted. Due to the inadequate number of structures in our country which are intended for evacuation during disasters, schools have been used in some cases as evacuation centers, again disrupting the school’s operations. To assure that school buildings will be operational in times of disaster, structural vulnerability assessment and appropriate retrofitting must be carried out. Due to budgetary constraints in most schools, a prioritization scheme must be devised to identify the buildings that must be given immediate attention. A rapid visual screening on the structural vulnerability due to earthquake hazards can be done and then rank the buildings for more detailed inspection and retrofitting. To refine the screening and ranking, the functional asset value of the buildings can be used as a second criterion. In a post-disaster scenario, school buildings have two important functional asset values: (a) Educational Functional Value and (b) Emergency Functional Value. The educational function focuses on “continuous learning” and consists of continuous conduct of classes, preservation of school records and documents for future use, and availability of basic resources and access to basic facilities. Emergency function focuses on “protecting lives” and consists of post-disaster uses of the school such as an evacuation center, storage of relief goods and an operation center. This study aims to develop a method of assigning an index corresponding to a school building’s post-disaster functional asset value using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and an expert’s survey. Moreover, using the two-level vulnerability screening as a prioritization scheme, decision makers can prioritize the buildings that have high seismic risk and high functional asset value. This methodology was applied on a school campus as a case study.