Station Design: Essential Facility Response to Climate Change

Record-breaking heat, more frequent droughts and wildfires, deluges of rain, stronger hurricanes and floods, and more power outages. Each of these is linked to each other and to climate change, and the issue of climate change isn’t going away. How do essential and mission-critical facilities handle the challenges that are created by these phenomena?

Essential facilities
An essential facility is any humanmade structure whose destruction or impairment has the potential to disrupt vital socioeconomic activities. The International Building Code (IBC), which is produced by the International Code Council and is the basis for most building codes across the United States, designates emergency vehicle garages and fire, rescue, ambulance and police stations as essential facilities. These buildings don’t have the option of closing, and their occupants can’t work from home during a bad storm or major event. The buildings must be capable of handling any disaster that’s thrown at them.

The American Institute of Architects’ Disaster Assistance Handbook defines a disaster as any hazard event that’s of such great intensity that it overwhelms the local capacity to respond. An impact modifier is a natural or humanmade feature that further alters the severity of the hazard. Climate change is an impact modifier that increases the height and speed of storm surge, worsens the impact of breaking waves, changes precipitation patterns, exacerbates temperature extremes and increases the frequency of droughts.

Buildings & climate change
Aside from the immediate effects of being in the path of, say, a wildfire or a hurricane, consequences for public safety facilities as a result of changes to the climate also are rooted in local weather. More precipitation means that doors might sit below the base flood elevation, where once they were at or above it. Windows might not be prepared to handle the impact of high winds and debris. Mechanical and electrical equipment might be insufficient to handle new temperature extremes. Roof supports might not be able to handle increasing snow loads. The emotional and logistical stresses of climate change might worsen civil unrest, resulting in more humanmade crises.

Repairs and recovering from damage after a disaster can get very expensive very quickly. However, according to the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2017 Interim Report, every $1 that’s spent that exceeds the 2015 IBC’s baseline standards on hazard mitigation saves $4 over the long run. If a 4:1 return on investment isn’t enticing enough, a 23-year-long study that was conducted by FEMA and the National Institute of Building Sciences found that federal mitigation grants that were provided by FEMA, the Economic Development Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development resulted in saving $6 for every $1 that was invested in mitigation.

Strategies and assessments
Hazard mitigation reduces vulnerability and risk. It also must consider future generations and an escalation of hazards. That said, it needn’t break the bank. By identifying essential programmatic features that a fire station or an other facility must have, architects, engineers and designers can consolidate resources to allow for greater budgetary freedom to incorporate resiliency measures. For example, by designing multi-use spaces, square footage, unnecessary circulation paths and redundancies can be reduced. Nonessential functions can be relocated to out-buildings or off site to cost effectively prioritize mitigation measures.

There are five steps to developing a vulnerability assessment.

• Identify potential hazards, including microclimate, topography, vegetation, neighboring property composition and local infrastructure.
• Characterize interdependencies, such as the location, age, and vulnerability of local utilities and infrastructure.
• Characterize the social dimensions of a building, meaning the required functions and capacities of a building relative to the people who use it.
• Identify the effects of a potential hazard event on a building component or piece of equipment. This entails identifying which systems are most likely to be affected and predicting the extent of the damage.
• Identify performance goals and prioritize issues that are based on the relative exposure to risk and the consequences of failure.

Case study
The Saratoga County Public Safety Facility, which is located in Ballston Spa, NY, serves as a model of the kind of value that these assessments provide.

During the design and programming phase of this project, stakeholders and the architect performed a vulnerability assessment and identified the likely threats to the facility. The threats ranged from natural causes, such as tornadoes and windborne debris, to humanmade threats.

Through careful planning, the team maintained the project budget by consolidating much of the critical infrastructure and essential uses into a “central core.” The corridors and means of egress that service the core also were considered critical and received the same treatment. This allowed for the allocation of some of the budget toward hardening the core while maintaining a more traditional budget and construction process for the various offices and services that are around it. Within the core, a public safety answering point, an emergency operations center and critical IT infrastructure are safe from the threats that were identified in the vulnerability assessment.

Tools and experts
Technical guidance, tools and rating systems that include strategies for hazard mitigation are extensive and updated frequently. Licensed architects and engineers are trained in these tools. These experts work at the intersection of planet, place and people to protect human health, safety and welfare.

Consult with a licensed professional on your next project to determine how your station or facility can improve its climate resiliency.