INNOVATION March-April 2016

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to respond immediately to emergency situations in the terminal, take care of the people in the facility at the time of an event, assess the facilities, and return to operation as quickly as possible. The airport maintains operations, building maintenance and airfield emergency services teams onsite 24 hours a day. These employees are tasked with handling immediate response, dealing with facility issues, responding to medical issues, and taking care of thousands of passengers that could be stranded at the airport for days after an emergency event such as an earthquake. Their response will be critical to minimising impact and managing the situation onsite. A key part of emergency training comprises up-to-date assessment of the potential damage to airport facilities—buildings, bridges and runways. In order to better plan and prepare detailed immediate response plans, emergency operations people need to know what to expect after a major earthquake and how various facilities will perform. To that end, structural consultants recently completed Post Earthquake Rapid Damage Assessment Manuals (PERDAMs) for the Domestic and International terminals, and the Airside Operations and other buildings. The manuals outline a systematic method for non-structural engineers or YVR operations, maintenance or airfield emergency service responders with PERDAM training to quickly assess each building’s safety, area by area, within hours of an earthquake. The manuals include floor layouts, step-by-step paths through areas, pictures of each structural element to be checked, and checklists. The manual, for example, directs responders to look for cracks on a concrete staircase’s interior and exterior wall (a shearwall). Depending on the size of any cracks observed, a responder would post colour- coded cards to indicate whether the area is safe to occupy (Green), can be accessed only with caution (Yellow), or is unsafe (Red). The Airport Authority is integrating the manuals into its earthquake emergency response plan, and volunteers from the engineering, maintenance, operations and emergency response groups are undergoing PERDAM training by the structural engineers for each of the buildings.

Plan, Implement, Assess, Adjust… Then Repeat

As we have seen in Haiti, Japan and elsewhere, the resistance and resilience of airports and other transportation infrastructure to major seismic events and earthquakes are critical to a region’s rapid recovery. The Vancouver Airport Authority (YVR) has a well-developed emergency response plan for such an event. The methodology used for all YVR emergency response plans starts with assessing the current situation, planning a response or approach to handle the event—including action plans for immediate emergency response—training and practicing the response, and implementing facilities upgrades. Then the process starts again: we reassess it to see if we got it right and to improve it further. The first seismic assessment of the original Airport Terminal Building (Domestic Terminal) conducted in the mid-1990s showed the building—constructed in the mid-1960s on liquefiable soil—would not perform well in a major seismic event. Read Jones Christoffersen Consulting Engineers developed a detailed seismic upgrade masterplan, and YVR adopted a strategy to include seismic upgrading as part of every upgrade project. Projects as small as washroom or coffee shop renovations include all seismic work identified in the masterplan—within the floor, walls and ceiling, and including shearwalls, braces and diaphragm work. In some cases, renovations on one level have triggered upgrades to major shearwalls down through other levels, resulting in foundation upgrades such as pile-cap enlargement, grade beams and soil densification. After 20 years, approximately 80 percent of the Domestic Terminal’s seismic upgrade work has been completed. A task that seemed daunting in 1996 is expected to be complete within another decade—and the terminal has remained operational throughout. The phased approach has proved to be a cost- effective and operationally efficient way to upgrade complex existing infrastructure. The other side of YVR’s emergency preparedness involves developing emergency response plans, training operations and emergency response providers, and practicing the plans through exercises that include YVR staff, airlines and emergency response agencies. The response plans are designed to enable the airport

Don Ehrenholz, P.Eng.

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M A R CH/A P R I L 2 016

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