Planning school retrofits through
rapid visual assessment
Faculty and students of a Salvadoran engineering
program, along with researchers from the University of
Udine in Italy, pilot-tested the VISUS tool as a rapid visual
assessment methodology in 2014. VISUS is an expertbased methodology that organises and collects rapid visual
assessment information for school facilities through a tabletbased application. It then uses collected data to judge the
overall safety of school facilities. VISUS has been designed
to quickly aggregate data through photographic evidence
and prioritise the most appropriate action for achieving
school safety based on risk and cost. These actions are
listed as nothing, repair, retrofit or replacement.
congruence of the collected data. An algorithm then rated
school building on a 1-5 star system ranked by risk and
retrofit cost.
VISUS was able to effectively train and immediately rely
on local students and professors for site visits because
of its rigorous review protocol. By producing detailed and
functional pictorial evidence, the oversight could be exported
off-site, increasing speed and reducing costs.
Even though El Salvador has a relatively robust university
system, civil engineering students are not required
to take courses in evaluating existing buildings for
seismic safety. For one month, VISUS developers from
the University of Udine in Italy, together with UNESCO
personnel, communicated with a Salvadoran professor who
spearheaded the pilot project. He provided pictures from
previous earthquakes and information detailing the technical
aspects of typical school construction in El Salvador. Over
time, this initial contact snowballed into a steering group,
which maintained the project throughout its lifespan.
The VISUS pilot project assessed school buildings in the
departments of San Salvador, La Libertad and La Paz.
Ultimately five groups of three university students and a
professor visually assessed 100 buildings in 10 days. The
VISUS evaluation of the school took as little as a half an hour
and occasionally as long as three hours. When school staff
were available to guide the team, the evaluation process was
much faster.
SECTION III: PLANNING
After establishing a base of operations at the University of
El Salvador, the VISUS developers trained more than 60
people to perform the assessment, including personnel
from the MoE, Engineers Associations and a small team
of 15 students and 8 professors. The first half of the threeday training was in the classroom learning the concepts of
rapid visual assessment and the VISUS tablet application for
collecting data. In the latter half of the training, the trainees
got hands-on experience in the field. A day was added for
evidence-based photography so experts could verify the
team’s assessments after the fact.
Personnel from the MoE, engineering associations, students and
professors of civil engineering practice rapid visual assessment
of school buildings to determine which are most vulnerable to
earthquakes. Photo: Jair Torres/UNESCO
The VISUS methodology could be divided into three broad
chronological sections: characterisation, evaluation and
prescription for school safety upgrades. Teams used tablets
to photograph structural and non-structural characteristics
of schools and then match what they saw to a set of
pre-defined alternatives. The methodology related each
alternative to different damage levels the school would likely
experience in an earthquake.
The newly trained surveying team did not always have
sufficient expertise to correctly perform the matching.
However, the photo documentation was sent to a scientific
committee who vetted on-the-ground data, filling in any
gaps in experience. This double-checking helped verify the
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