ABOUT THE PROJECT

Background

The Regional Building Disaster Assessment Project (RBDAP) was a project of the RDPO’s Regional Emergency Managers Work Group (REMTEC) from 2021 to 2023. The project manager was Dr. Anne Castleton of the City of Portland’s Bureau of Development Services.

PURPOSE

To increase the readiness, cooperation, planning, and alignment of building officials, building inspectors, emergency managers and building departments across the region to respond to emergencies that require safety damage assessments for buildings and occupied structures so that people and government officials will know as soon as possible what buildings are safe and usable after a catastrophic emergency.

GOAL

To share and develop regional building damage assessment tools while building a strong cohort of aligned, trusted emergency, building and facility-related colleagues across the RDPO region.

The Regional Building Damage Assessment Task Force (RBDAT) is made up of building department staff and emergency managers from each of the 5 RDPO counties. They advised the project on building damage assessment issues and monitored the achievement of the project’s objectives. Learn more.

RBDAP wanted to ensure that the challenges and problems we proposed to tackle in the project were actually the right problems and to see what issues we might have missed. We did this with a Feasibility Study. Over several months in Q4, 2021, we had discussions with more than 50 staff from all 5 counties, municipalities within each county, and from TriMet, Metro, Port of Portland and the RDPO Messaging WG. Participants were building officials, inspectors, plan reviewers, fire marshals, and emergency managers.

In 2019, Oregon passed legislation tasking the Oregon State Fire Marshal's office to develop OrSAP, and in 2021 they funded it. OrSAP is under development and RBDAP’s project manager and other members of RBDAT serve on the advisory committee. The OARs have been released, the OrSAP training module has been developed, and the Building Safety Evaluator (BSE) database is accepting registrations.

• 4.1 Post-earthquake damage notifications - learn more

• 4.2  Stranded Worker Agreements (SWAGs) - learn more

• 4.3  Prioritizing Critical Building Infrastructure (discontinued) - learn more

• 4.4  Regional coordination for building safety evaluators (discontinued) - learn more.

• 4.5 Emergency Quick Inspection Program (EQUIP) - learn more

• 4.6 Regional GIS working group for damage assessments (discontinued) - learn more

• 4.7 Public messaging for building safety and the DA process - learn more

All post-earthquake building placarding programs are based on the ATC20 rapid and detailed building safety evaluation method. States have their own emergency management administrative systems like Cal OES SAP, WAsafe, and OrSAP. Jurisdictions have relied on CALOES SAP training and certification while WAsafe and OrSAP were under development.