Under the auspices of the World Bank, a multi-step risk assessment project has been recently completed for Metropolitan Manila, Philippines, the country’s primary commercial and business center, the 11th most populous metropolis in the world, with 12 million (13% of the national population). This area is susceptible to multihazard natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and typhoons. To address the vulnerability to natural disasters, a comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation program was undertaken and showed that the earthquake exposure was the key hazard to mitigate. A prioritization and seismic retrofit program was developed and focused on public schools and hospitals that have suffered disproportional damage and casualties in past disasters worldwide. The key steps in the program were to: a) prioritize vulnerable structures, b) conduct cost-benefit analysis to assess retrofit options, and c) prepare a seismic retrofitting guidelines including design examples and details. Approximately, 4,000 structures were evaluated using the available database of school and hospital buildings. The probabilistic evaluation platform was based on the global best practice, incorporated structural loss and fatalities. Cost-effective retrofit options were developed for use of national engineers based on the state of art but simple seismic retrofit methods and modified for local construction. Analysis showed that by cost-effective retrofit of only a part of vulnerable structure stocks total fatalities can be significantly reduced.
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