This guide provides guidance on conducting seismic risk assessments for buildings. As such, this guide assists a User to assess a property's potential for losses from earthquake occurrences. Hazards addressed in this guide include earthquake ground shaking, earthquake-caused site instability, including fault rupture, landslides and soil liquefaction, lateral spreading and settlement, and earthquake-caused off-site response impacting the property, including flooding from dam or dike failure, tsunamis and seiches. This guide is intended to reflect a commercially prudent and reasonable investigation for performance of seismic risk assessments. Seismic risk assessments may be performed for an individual building or a group of buildings. This guide provides suggested approaches for the performance of five different types of seismic risk assessments. Building stability, site stability, building damageability, contents damageability, business interruption, and application and temporal relevance of report. Each is intended to serve different financial and management needs of the User. An earthquake ground motion assessment should be conducted in conjuction with probable loss evaluations for building damageability and may have applications in some scenario loss studies, as well as building stability or site stability assessments. Seismic risk assessments may consider varying degrees of assessment of a building or buildings from Level 0 to Level 3.

1.1 This guide provides guidance on conducting seismic risk assessments for buildings. As such, this guide assists a User to assess a property's potential for losses from earthquake occurrences.

1.1.1 Hazards addressed in this guide include earthquake ground shaking, earthquake-caused site instability, including fault rupture, landslides and soil liquefaction, lateral spreading and settlement, and earthquake-caused off-site response impacting the property, including flooding from dam or dike failure, tsunamis and seiches.

1.1.2 This guide does not address the following:

Earthquake-caused fires and toxic materials releases.

Federal, state, or local laws and regulations of building construction or maintenance. Users are cautioned that current federal, state, and local laws and regulations may differ from those in effect at the time of the original construction of the building(s).

Preservation of life safety.

Prevention of building damage.

Contractual and legal obligations between prior and subsequent Users of Seismic Risk Assessment reports or between Providers who prepared the report and those who would like to use such prior reports.

Contractual and legal obligations between a Provider and a User, and other parties, if any.

1.1.3 It is the responsibility of the User of this guide to establish appropriate life safety and damage prevention practices and determine the applicability of current regulatory limitations prior to use.

1.2 The objectives of this guide are:

1.2.1 To synthesize and document guidelines for seismic risk assessment of buildings from earthquakes;

1.2.2 To encourage standardized seismic risk assessment;

1.2.3 To establish guidelines for field observations of the site and physical conditions, and the document review and research considered appropriate, practical, sufficient, and reasonable for seismic risk assessment;

1.2.4 To establish guidelines on what reasonably can be expected of and delivered by a Provider in conducting the seismic risk assessment of buildings;

1.2.5 To establish guidelines on appropriate field observations and analysis for conducting a seismic risk assessment; and

1.2.6 To establish guidelines by which a Provider can communicate to the User observations, opinions, and conclusions in a manner that is meaningful and not misleading either by content or by omission.