In 2004, the Province of British Columbia, on the West Coast of Canada, announced a 10-15year, $1.5 billion seismic retrofit program for the province's 750 at-risk public schools. Thepurpose of this earthquake preparedness initiative is to accelerate the upgrading of school publicsafety in the moderate and high seismicity regions of the province. Given the magnitude of themitigation program, the province's Ministry of Education and the federal agency WesternEconomic Diversification Canada made a commitment to support the development of state-ofthe-art performance-based seismic engineering technology for achieving optimum safety within acost-effective mitigation framework, which could not be achieved based on current practice.This paper gives an overview of the formulation of performance-based structural assessment andretrofit design guidelines, which are currently being used by engineers to determine retrofitstrategies for schools in British Columbia.
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