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Asce Sei 7 22 Minimum Design Loads For Buildings and
Asce Sei 7 22 Minimum Design Loads For Buildings and
FEMA Public Comment Period on the National Flood Insurance Program’s Minimum
Floodplain Management Standards.
The American Society of Civil Engineers Standard ASCE/SEI 7-22 Minimum Design Loads for
Buildings and Other Structures incorporates a chapter on flood loading, Chapter 5. The ASCE 7
Flood Load Technical Committee is responsible for this chapter and is currently working on a
supplement which will propose determining flood loads based on flood mean recurrence
intervals (MRI) that are higher than the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) 100-year
standard for most building structures.
Our committee has found that the flood loads presently derived from the Base Flood (i.e., 100-
year flood or 1% annual probability of exceedance flood), do not meet the reliability targets of
the ASCE 7 standard. Wind events, which often occur concurrently with coastal floods, utilize
mean recurrence intervals of 300, 700, 1700, and 3000-years for Risk Category I-IV structures
respectively. The loads resulting from 100-year flood events are not proportional to the wind
events that are at these higher recurrence intervals. Previous editions of ASCE 7 have tried to
increase the reliability by applying a load factor of two on flood loads in coastal regions subject
to wave action. This scaling factor increased the magnitude of the flood loads for structures
within coastal high hazard areas but did not increase the depth over which the load was applied
or the geographic area where the flood load would be considered. This reduced the effectiveness
of the load factor approach.
Our committee is proposing a supplement to ASCE 7 to increase the geographic area subject to
flood provisions of the standard from the 100-year floodplain to the 500-year floodplain. We also
propose utilizing MRI flood elevations corresponding to the importance of a structure: a 100-
year MRI flood elevation would be used for Risk Category I Structures (structures with a low
risk to human life in the event of failure); a 500-year MRI flood elevation for Risk Category II
Structures (most residential and commercial structures); and a 750-year and 1,000-year MRI
flood elevation for Risk Category III and IV Structures, respectively (critical structures with the
highest risk to human life in the event of failure). In accordance with these proposals, we believe
that the 100-year flood is not an appropriate basis for the design for most structures.
As only loading is within the purview of this standard, we are providing the loading based on the
flood elevation and cannot mandate building floor elevations or construction standards. We
encourage FEMA to adopt the following: