Soft Story Risk Reduction - Lessons from the Berkeley Data





Soft Story Risk Reduction:

Lessons from the

Berkeley Data

A Special Projects and Initiatives report to Earthquake Engineering Research Institute

January 2013


Executive Summary

In 2005, the city of Berkeley, California began a mitigation program to address earthquake risks posed by certain residential buildings. The program required seismic evaluations of several hundred multi-unit woodframe buildings using specific engineering criteria.

The targeted buildings had been pre-selected as “soft story” buildings based largely on

their appearance. This report describes a study of the program’s technical findings, asking this question: How well do visible indicators of soft story deficiencies predict the results

of detailed evaluations of those same suspect buildings?


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