7.1 Overview

The previous chapters have focused on the protective design of office buildings because this occupancy is one that has been of most concern within the public and private sectors to date. The concepts discussed, however, are largely applicable to any type of civilian building serving large numbers of people on a daily basis. This chapter considers the unique challenges associated with three other high-occupancy building types: multi-family residential buildings, commercial retail buildings, and light-industrial buildings. Protection of schools and hospitals is addressed in other FEMA reports and is not explicitly addressed here.

The uniqueness of these other occupancy types from the perspective of protective design is a function of many factors, including hours of peak usage, dominant population, size of building, and construction type.

For dual-use facilities such as those that incorporate both retail and commercial office uses, two important recommendations for the HVAC are:

• to provide separate HVAC zones; and
• to strictly adhere to isolation principles (that is, to treat any public area as equivalent to an entrance lobby in a single-use building).