Safety Assessment Program Evaluator Student Manual

CA Emergency Mgmt. Agency Safety Assessment Program Evaluator Manual April 2011not clear. However, jurisdictions can ask for all their evaluations to be detailed ones ifthe damage is relatively slight and the number of buildings affected is low.Engineering Evaluation – where buildings are inspected carefully, using all availabledata to find the damage, its cause, and how to repair it. These inspections are engineeringinvestigations performed by architects and/or engineers retained by the building owner.Engineering evaluations can take anywhere from one full day to a week or more,depending on the size of the building and the type of damage. This level of evaluation isnot performed by the Safety Assessment Program.When these levels of evaluation were first thought out, the initial idea was that rapidevaluations would be done first to identify the obviously safe and unsafe structures, and thendetailed evaluations would be done on the structures where the conditions were not soobvious. After all of that, it was up to the building owner to retain an engineer or architect toperform the engineering evaluation and design the repairs.However, experience shows that, most likely, only one level of evaluation will be done. Assaid before, in a smaller disaster event the jurisdiction may decide to only have detailedevaluations done. In larger disasters, such as the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, jurisdictionswill probably only have rapid evaluations done. The RESTRICTED USE placard has madeits way as a routine part of the rapid evaluation process, so there will be less need to do twolevels of evaluations on the same buildings in the future. The important thing for aquestionable structure is to have the correct limitations or restrictions placed on its use oroccupancy. Once that is done, the building owner can retain the services of an engineer orarchitect to begin the repair process.It should be noted that no one should be handing out their business cards while on a SAPactivation to seek business opportunities. If someone wants to pursue such after theirdeployment is over and they have returned home, that is up to them, but it would be a conflictof interest to seek business opportunities while on official business for local government, andwould lead to being dismissed as a SAP evaluator.2.6.1 Rapid EvaluationsEarly in the initial response to a disaster, local governments are very interested in gettingbuildings in their jurisdiction evaluated for safety as quickly as possible. The buildingofficial is responsible to implement priorities for safety assessment, which should alwaysstart with essential services buildings and shelters as established in the operational plan of thejurisdiction. It is most likely that the early evaluations will all be rapid evaluations. Later onin the response, there will be some phone calls into the building department asking fordetailed evaluations (in the way of „second looks‟ at their buildings), and there will beelected officials seeking to reset priorities to „take care of their districts.‟ It is most likelythat the number of detailed assessments will increase as these latter activities take place.After some initial controversy, local governments weighed in to have a method of estimatingbuilding damage placed into the ATC rapid and detailed safety assessment forms. Thisfeature allows local governments to come up with a somewhat rational estimate of thedamage costs. Safety assessment evaluators are not to come up with dollar amounts, but theycan gather the square footage and degree of damage information that allows local62