A Decision-Making Framework for Fire Damaged Reinforced Concrete Buildings Based on Post Fire Detailed Damage Assessment

Prateek Raj Pandit; Lekshmy Meenakumari Jayakumar

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.86027

A Decision-Making Framework for Fire Damaged Reinforced Concrete Buildings Based on Post Fire Detailed Damage Assessment

Author(s)	Mr. Prateek Raj Pandit, Ms. Lekshmy Meenakumari Jayakumar
Country	India
Abstract	After a building fire the owner has to be told one of three things: repair it, strengthen it, or take it down. The literature on fire damaged concrete is concerned largely with what can be measured. It does not settle the separate question of what to do with the measurement, and the standards in common use do not state the order in which evidence should be gathered, the point at which it is sufficient, or the rule that converts it into a recommendation. This paper sets out a procedure that does, and reports its application to seven fire damaged reinforced concrete buildings in Kathmandu following the fires of September 2025. The procedure classifies every fire affected element into five damage classes, triggers non-destructive testing at a damage class of two or above, expresses residual capacity against a reference capacity taken from the original structural and construction records, and reads that capacity against fixed bands that return a specific action for each member. Damage was concentrated rather than distributed in all seven buildings, and within individual buildings the difference between the weakest and the strongest tested member reached fifty-three percentage points, so a single verdict for a whole building would have described none of the members it was meant to represent. The non-destructive estimate was found to be unusable in two of the five buildings in which it was computed, returning residual capacities above one hundred percent in one and about one megapascal for load-carrying members in the other. Destructive testing was recommended in all seven buildings as the confirming step but could be carried out in only one, the constraint being cost, and the recommendations in the remaining six were issued on the non-destructive evidence read together with the visual classification and the structural parameters of the final step. Those six recommendations are therefore reported as provisional, and the knowledge factor of IS 15988:2013 is proposed as the mechanism by which the resulting loss of confidence is carried into the capacity evaluation. The outcomes were two repairs, three strengthening decisions, one global retrofit with partial reconstruction and one demolition.
Keywords	Post Fire Assessment, Residual Capacity, Damage Classification, Destructive Testing, Structural Decision-Making
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-18
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.86027

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A Decision-Making Framework for Fire Damaged Reinforced Concrete Buildings Based on Post Fire Detailed Damage Assessment

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