Disclaimer

The papers on this site are research notes. Each one states what it checks and what it does not claim.

• No paper is an assessment of a building's condition. No paper says whether a building can be occupied, repaired or demolished.
• No paper replaces the judgment of a licensed engineer who has examined the building.
• When a paper finds that a published number agrees with the inputs printed beside it, that shows the arithmetic agrees. It does not show that the inputs are right, or that an independent engineer would reach the same result.
• Unless a paper says otherwise, we have no record that it has been reviewed by an engineer outside Chazut Foundation.

Chazut Foundation is developing a software tool. It is designed to draft a seismic assessment of an existing building for a licensed engineer to review, correct and sign. We describe its design as "physics-based analysis, engineer-signed".

That is a design, not a service. The tool is not offered to anyone. Nothing on this site is an offer to assess a building.

Not yet tested. The tool is in development. It has not been tested in use. In particular:

• its drafts have not been compared, blind, with licensed engineers' assessments of the same buildings; none of the comparisons published here is blind: they check arithmetic against numbers a published study printed, whose results were known before computing, or against an independent recomputation;
• it has not been tested on buildings with observed earthquake damage;
• how often it refers a building to an engineer has not been measured;
• several of its parts, including photo capture and damage classification, are not finished yet.

We are asking engineers and professors to help test it. Until that testing is done and published, nothing the tool produces should be used to make a decision about a building.

How it is designed to work, once tested.

• An engineer reviews, corrects and signs every assessment it drafts. The engineer can change any classification, and the analysis runs again.
• Every structural number comes from a physics solver or from the arithmetic of the building code. No language or image model produces a structural number.
• A fixed set of rules sets the minimum level of referral to an engineer for each building. A language or image model can only raise that level, never lower it.
• When in doubt, it leans toward sending a building to an engineer. It says so on the face of every draft.
• It states what it observed, what it did not observe, and why, and which elements it could not establish because its instrument failed; those are never counted as showing no indicators. When it finds no damage indicators, that means only that it found none in what it was shown. A building can have damage the tool did not see.

No page, no paper and no output of the tool says whether a building can be occupied, or that a building has no damage.

Chazut Foundation does research and builds software. It does not offer to evaluate, analyse, inspect or review any particular building. It does not present itself as an engineer. It does not present anyone working with it as an engineer unless that person is a licensed engineer.

This site cannot tell you. Ask an engineer who can examine the building to assess it.

After an earthquake, follow the instructions of the local authorities.

In Colombia, under Ley 842 de 2003, art. 6, practising engineering in the branches and specialties that law governs legally requires registration in the professional register that COPNIA (Consejo Profesional Nacional de Ingeniería) keeps. The official text of the law notes that the Constitutional Court upheld this article on the understanding that professionals of engineering-related disciplines with their own professional council register with that council (Sentencia C-570 de 2004).

hola@chazut.org (English or Spanish)