RESEARCH ARTICLE
Can Building Codes Stop the Vicious Cycle of Recurrent Disaster?
América Bendito*, 1, Arnaldo Guitérrez2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 226
Last Page: 235
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-9-226
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501509010
Article History:
Received Date: 4/11/2014Revision Received Date: 24/11/2014
Acceptance Date: 2/12/2014
Electronic publication date: 28/5/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Despite advances and large amounts of money invested in science and technology to reduce disasters, many communities in developed and developing countries are still facing challenges to disaster reduction. Although we recognize the diversity of risk vulnerabilities, the focus of this paper will be on what we consider a fundamental vulnerability in urban and rural environments, namely, nonexistent or outdated building codes. We will review for different countries and contexts, the pre- and post-disaster building performance and building codes to understand what the main problems are, what we could be doing better, and what we can do to stop the vicious cycle of recurrent disasters.