Deferred maintenance has taken a heavy toll on the nation’s stock of institutional and commercial facilities. Maintenance and engineering managers struggle to quantify and find adequate funding to address the massive backlogs they face.
Now, as climate change fuels more intense and frequent natural disasters, managers also need to understand the toll that these events will have on the condition of their facilities, as well as their long-term maintenance, repair and replacement.
A recently published study, “Weather Effects on the Lifecycle of U.S. Department of Defense Equipment Replacement,” spotlights a framework designed to help managers with this challenge, according to Science Direct.
The study’s researchers focused on the large building portfolio of the U.S. Department of Defense across the 48 contiguous states. The team maintains that understanding the elevated risks to buildings and equipment from extreme weather events will help large organizations better plan for the rising costs associated with long-range facilities maintenance and replacement.
The study’s climate services team calculated a suite of extreme weather metrics in historical and future climates. The team also developed a damage association matrix (DAM that categorizes climate hazards, the types of damages the hazards produce, and the building components that are impacted. The matrix then applies the building-component risks to a specific facility to effectively compute potential risks or damages. Finally, researchers developed software called the Weather Effects on the Lifecycle of the U.S. Department of Defense Equipment Replacement (WELDER), that uses the extreme weather metrics and the DAM.
Users can change the uncertainty and associated lifecycle impact to building components based on their understanding of local conditions, the current state of the infrastructure, and the desire to proactively respond to extreme event threats. They also can calibrate the software for all regions of interest within the contiguous United States.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
