Building Codes Save: FEMA’s Nationwide Building Code Losses Avoided Study

Abstract:

The adoption and enforcement of modern, hazard-resistant building codes and standards helps to reduce the costs of natural disasters and make communities more resilient. But not all communities adopt them. Building Codes Save: A Nationwide Losses Avoided Study models reduced disaster losses from modern codes to incentivize code adoption. It focuses on development of an innovative nationwide database of buildings, applying FEMA’s Hazus software to compute modern code performance relative to pre-modern code performance in terms of risk of losses due to flood, hurricane and seismic hazards. The study quantifies the performance benefits, in terms of direct physical and economic losses avoided, from State and Local adoption of modern hazard-resistant building codes and standards, mainly the International Building Code (IBC) and International Residential Code (IRC). The nationwide parcel-level dataset of the over 18M buildings constructed nationwide since the year 2000, applies key hazard-resistant building-specific characteristics, such as foundation, roof, and frame type; square footage; year built and code version. The performance modeling includes flood, and hurricane wind and seismic hazards exposure from code maps and provisions, applied according to local building code adoption history. Hazus modeling of parcel level data quantifies local-level changes, aggregated to the county level and reported as Average Annualized Losses (AAL) Avoided, for comparison with past actual AAL's and poised increase, for greater resilience during the next 20 years and beyond.