Helping the Canadian Parliamentary Precinct achieve seismic resiliency in their Long-term Visions Plan
The parliamentary precinct is home to some of the Canadian government’s most vital services. This concentrated cluster of buildings houses the senate, house of commons, the PM’s office and many critical government facilities. It is also a portfolio of architectural and heritage significance. Protection of life and essential parliamentary services is of paramount importance to Canada in the wake of a major earthquake in Ottawa. For this complex portfolio consisting of a mixture of buildings from different material, construction practice and era, understanding the timing, the quantity of investment and the capacity to maintain government function are absolutely critical to its modernization, an ambitious long-term plan that will occupy planners for next few decades.
To help the Parliamentary Precinct address these challenges, Kinetica Risk developed fully probabilistic risk assessments using high fidelity computer simulations of building dynamic response and damage under earthquakes for buildings within the parliamentary precinct that are undergoing or will be undergoing important upgrades intended to achieve ambitious performance goals. These assessments used complete content models for each asset created based on available information to capture, to the highest resolution possible, the distribution and extent of damage to building components in order to develop a refined understanding of the post-earthquake scenarios, along with ways to expedite recovery from events of various severity.
The cost and benefits of different mitigation solutions are also examined to support decision-making for individual buildings within the portfolio. This information aids individual project teams within the parliamentary precinct in defining project scopes over the assets’ life-spans based on clear risk reduction objectives while maximizing the efficacy of capital investments. At the portfolio level, the output of this work quantifies the risk exposure and the cost-benefits of interventions for the entire campus as an integrated facility providing critical services.
