Toward a Risk-Informed Performance-Based Approach for Post-Earthquake Fire Protection Design of Buildings

Abstract

Post-earthquake fires have extracted great tolls on society. While this has been acknowledged for some time and significant effort has been expended to develop tools to simulate post-earthquake fire spread at an urban scale, to develop performance-based seismic design methods for buildings, and to develop performance-based fire design methods for buildings, there has been little research dedicated to the development of performance-based design approaches which integrate earthquake and fire design of structures. In this paper, an overview of the post-earthquake fire problem and of post-earthquake building performance is provided, performance-based seismic and fire design approaches are briefly introduced, and developments toward risk-informed performance-based approach to seismic and fire design for buildings in earthquake-prone areas are presented.