ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Education of British Columbia (BC) has allocated CD$1.5 billion for the assessment and retrofit of the province’s schools. Engineers and researchers have been working on implementing a set of guidelines (herein referred as the guidelines) for the practitioner engineers in order to use the Ministry’s fund in a cost-effective manner. There are several schools in the project that require important seismic upgrading in the short term. The most common structural systems in the schools are plywood shear-walls, un-reinforced masonry walls and reinforced concrete squat walls. However, steel systems, such as eccentrically braced frames and moderately ductile steel moment-resistance frames, have also been studied and included in the guidelines as feasible retrofit options.
