A $3.6-million study at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center in Berkeley, Calif., will develop ways to assess the most dangerous nonductile concrete buildings, considered among the most vulnerable in earthquakes. The five-year effort, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, will also produce procedures to toughen the frames. PEER will create an inventory of the older-type concrete buildings for one urban region to serve as a test-bed for regional loss studies. It also will conduct laboratory and field experiments on concrete components and foundations and produce computer simulations of nonductile concrete structures under quake loads. In California alone, there are an estimated 40,000 buildings framed using nonductile concrete.