Building damage & repair

News and Updates

NIST Report to Congress Provides Update on Champlain Towers South Investigation

February 5, 2025

The report notes that the team has completed all experimental work on the physical evidence from the building’s structural elements.

NIST Earthquake Engineering Group Members Conduct a Preliminary Earthquake Reconnaissance Mission to Turkey

August 31, 2023

In the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, a M W 7.8 earthquake occurred in Turkey, followed by four additional earthquakes throughout the day with MW of 5

A steel column with a deep web on the left and a steel column with a shallow web on the right.

Proposed Updates to Steel Building Standard Could Enhance Earthquake Resilience

January 7, 2022

Since the mid-1990s, a type of steel column that commonly features slender cross-sectional elements has become more prevalent in buildings along the West Coast

Blog Posts

A man in safety gear crouches to examine a damaged wall inside a building after an earthquake.

The Highs and Lows of Studying the Aftermath of One of Turkey’s Deadliest Earthquakes

Hurricane Maria Recollections, Software Nostalgia, The Brothers Engineering: A Sample of Stories on NIST Social Media

My Journey From Designing Dams to Helping Structures Live Their Longest Lives

Projects and Programs

Functional Recovery of Buildings and Lifelines

Ongoing

Objective The Functional Recovery project is designed to improve the time for recovery of key social functions by strengthening the built environment to withstand earthquake impacts. Our efforts will advance measurement science for the assessment and design of buildings and lifelines, contribute in

Performance Criteria Development

Ongoing

Objective To advance component-level seismic performance criteria in current design standards by conducting focused experimental tests and analytical studies. Technical Idea In the following, the technical idea for each of the RTs is presented separately: RT1: High-Strength Reinforcement in

Risk Evaluation and Mitigation

Ongoing

Objective This project aims to improve techniques currently used for risk evaluation (including uncertainty quantification) and mitigation (including FRP retrofit) of structural systems and integrate them within the PBEE framework. The first phase of the project is focused on the development and

Hierarchical Materials

Ongoing

The STG develops the methods and metrology that will lead to the understanding of the structure-property relationships of hierarchical composites in real medical PPE or protective applications, which heretofore has been lacking. This work establishes in situ monitoring of advanced manufacturing

Publications

A Technical Framework to Map Functional Recovery Performance Objectives to Prescriptive Seismic Design Provisions for Buildings

September 19, 2024

Author(s)

Dustin Cook, Siamak Sattar

Designing buildings for improved functional recovery represents a major shift in the current design paradigm. Given the novelty of the functional recovery

Evaluating the Variability in Functional Recovery Performance of Modern Buildings Across the United States

July 9, 2024

Author(s)

Kristen Blowes, Carlos Molina-Hutt, Dustin Cook

As building codes in the United States move toward the development of functional recovery provisions aimed at reducing recovery times following earthquakes, it

FEMA P-58 RESILIENCE ANALYSIS OF BUILDING PORTFOLIOS CONSIDERING GROUND MOTION CORRELATIONS

July 9, 2024

Author(s)

Jack Baker, Curtis Haselton, Ed Almeter, Dustin Cook

Functional Recovery in Modern Reinforced Concrete Buildings

July 5, 2024

Author(s)

Dustin Cook, ABBIE LIEL, Amir Safiey

In the field of structural engineering, functional recovery is a new, but non-standardized building design objective intended to improve a building's capacity