The demand for developing a rapid, reliable, and effective technique for prioritizing the buildings with high seismic vulnerability and assisting disaster mitigation in developing postearthquake safety plans for highly vulnerable buildings, is always challenging for engineers.  Therefore, this course was prepared to achieve this goal. The objective of this course is to assist a licensed design professional, forensic structural engineers, consulting engineers or/and a licensed general contractor to deeply know, and understand the seismic assessment of large number of existing buildings by Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) procedure based on FEMA P154, 3rd Edition guidelines. This procedure can be implemented relatively quickly and inexpensively to develop a list of potentially hazardous buildings without the high cost of a detailed seismic analysis of individual buildings. The FEMA P-154 : “Report, Rapid Visual Screening of Buildings for Potential Seismic Hazards: A Handbook, 3rd Edition”, is the first of a two-volume publication on recommended methodology for rapid visual screening of buildings for potential seismic hazards. The technical basis for the methodology, including the scoring system and its development, is contained in the companion volume, FEMA P-155 report, Rapid Visual Screening of Buildings for Potential Seismic Hazards: Supporting Documentation (FEMA, 2015). Both this document and the companion document are third editions of similar documents first published by FEMA in 1988 and updated in 2002.

Learning Objectives

• Identify if a particular building requires further evaluation for assessment of its seismic vulnerability or not.
• Rank a city’s or community’s (or organization’s) seismic rehabilitation needs.
• Design a seismic risk management program for a city or a community.
• Plan post-earthquake building safety evaluation efforts.
• Develop building-specific seismic vulnerability information for purposes such as regional rating, prioritization for redevelopment etc.
• Identify simplified retrofitting requirements for a particular building (to collapse prevention level) where further evaluations are not feasible.
• Increase awareness among city residents regarding the seismic vulnerability of buildings.
• Various examples of buildings have been evaluated by RVS in this course.