Seismic Assessment Risk Methodology for Portland Public Schools

Description 

Public school districts face growing pressure to improve seismic resilience across aging buildings while managing limited funding, rigorous governance, and meaningful public engagement. In this session, Holmes Principal Jennifer Eggers and Project Engineer Shannon Andrews share insights from their work on seismic assessments and retrofits for schools across the Pacific Northwest.  

Eggers and Andrews focus on the two-phase seismic assessment and risk-ranking program provided for Portland Public Schools (PPS), a district with 98 campuses and 9 million square feet of property. That work required district-wide structural assessments, including seismic screening for each building, with risk metrics for general construction types combined with building-specific data such as structural deficiencies and retrofit history to produce comparable risk scores across the portfolio.  

The PPS assessment and risk-ranking program offers practical lessons for K-12 districts nationwide and other organizations facing portfolio-level assessment and prioritization of work in an environment of competing demands and resources. 

Speaker Info 

Jennifer Eggers, PE, SE
Principal
Holmes
Email: jennifer.eggers@holmes.us
Phone: 503-673-9323 

Jennifer Eggers is Principal and Pacific Northwest Regional Manager at Holmes. She has 20 years of experience with K-12 facilities and deep expertise in aging school portfolios. As principal in charge of the Portland Public Schools assessment program, Jennifer led district-wide vulnerability data collection and ASCE 41 Tier 1-informed deficiency identification and helped develop the risk-scoring framework used to guide retrofit decisions. She has built a long-standing relationship with PPS through her understanding of the district’s facility planning goals and her ability to explain seismic risk clearly to community stakeholders. 

Shannon Andrews, Ph.D.
Project Engineer
Holmes
Email: shannon.andrews@holmesgroup.com
Phone: 649-308-7029 

Shannon Andrews, Ph.D., is a structural project engineer at Holmes with expertise in seismic risk assessment and existing building evaluation. She identifies structural vulnerabilities and develops efficient retrofit strategies for building owners. For the PPS assessment program, Shannon supported technical delivery through district-wide building evaluations, including document review and site walks. She led development of the risk-scoring methodology, combining baseline vulnerability measures with building-specific attributes to produce comparable scores across a large portfolio. Her analytical work helped make the framework technically sound, credible, and defensible.