Hurricanes are among the most costly natural hazards affecting communities worldwide, in terms of both property damage and loss of life. The landfall of a hurricane involves different hazard sources (i.e., wind, windborne debris, flood, and rain) that interact to generate the hazard scenario for a given structure. Hence, a novel multi-hazard methodology is required to accurately estimate the risk due to hurricanes and to provide easily interpreted guidance to insurers, emergency administrators, builders, and owners on how to reduce potential losses.

Co-Director Dr. Michele Barbato was invited to a give a seminar to the American Society of Civil Engineers Sacramento Section's Capitol Branch Monthly Meeting on "Performance Based Hurricane Engineering (PBHE) framework:  Formulation and application to single-family housing and tall buildings." His presentation illustrates a novel probabilistic Performance-Based Hurricane Engineering (PBHE) framework that is based on the Total Probability Theorem. The proposed framework disaggregates the risk assessment analysis into independent elementary components and innovatively accounts for concurrent and interacting hazard sources as well as for their possible sequential effects. The presentation highlights the relation between the newly proposed PBHE framework and other single-hazard Performance-Based Engineering frameworks such as Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering and Performance-Based Wind Engineering. It also demonstrates how the PBHE framework can be used for: (1) the loss analysis of single-family housing in the US Gulf Coast through a cost/benefit comparison of different hazard mitigation techniques, and (2) the loss analysis of tall buildings subject to both hurricane and non-hurricane winds.

Watch the full presentation on the ASCE Sacramento Section's website here and then reach out to Dr. Barbato with follow up questions!