Support for Safer Schools Reconstruction

The Support for Safer Schools Reconstruction project assisted the Secretariat of Public Education with the reconstruction of school buildings in the areas of Mexico most affected by two powerful earthquakes in 2017. The first, an 8.1 Mw quake on September 7, was the strongest in decades to affect the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. On September 19, a 7.1 Mw earthquake struck central Mexico, approximately 120 kilometers southeast of Mexico City. An estimated 16,000 school facilities were affected, and initial estimates put the cost of reconstructing educational infrastructure at 20 billion pesos (US$1 billion). The Secretariat of Public Education and the National Institute for School Infrastructure led the recovery and reconstruction efforts in the education sector, with the World Bank supporting them by informing and documenting the recovery process. In particular, the World Bank provided assistance with the design of the recovery strategy for school infrastructure and a seismic vulnerability reduction strategy for new and existing school infrastructure subject to intervention and with the development of an information platform to evaluate building performance in future earthquakes.

Activities supported by the World Bank

• Evaluation of the damage to and structural failures of school buildings, based on evidence collected from field inspections on the seismic performance of a representative group of building types

• Evaluation of the seismic performance of school buildings retrofitted before the recent earthquakes, to assess the effectiveness of the techniques used as well as maintenance requirements

• Completion of structural modeling and analysis of the most common building types, both retrofitted and not, to evaluate the level of seismic performance

• Derivation of vulnerability and fragility curves for each building type, based on the results of the structural analyses

• Structural modeling and analysis of retrofitting solutions to improve the seismic performance of the most common building types, both retrofitted and not, for different levels of seismic performance

• Proposal of recommendations to inform the recovery process with regard to retrofitting techniques, strengthened quality processes, and so forth

• Training workshops at the national and subnational (that is, the state) levels to disseminate results, with emphasis on the importance of informing the recovery process based on lessons learned

Main outputs

• One intermediate and one final technical report of the main findings, including the following:

             1. Structural classification of different building types, according to the taxonomy proposed

                  in the Global Library of School Infrastructure (GLOSI) 

             2. Identification and description of the main building types

             3. Highlighting of representative index buildings for each of the building types identified

             4. Modeling and structural analysis of the selected index buildings to evaluate seismic performance levels

• One national-level workshop and two or three state-level workshops, focused on training and on disseminating results of the analyses and modeling activities