Knowing when a building is structurally deteriorating, and actually doing something about it can be very different things, as the collapse in Surfside, Fla., has shown this month. And while onsite visual inspections are still the common kind of structural assessment, other methods can assess the health of a building or piece of infrastructure and determine its soundness (see p. 69).
“This doesn’t get the amount of attention that it should. Having performance metrics on structures is such a commonsense, building-health approach,” says Thomas Winant, president of STRAAM.