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Find your site's hazards and design values

Climate is not hazard. A temperate site can be seismic and a hot arid site can flood. List which of wind, earthquake, flood and wildfire apply before the structure is fixed.

How

1. Start from the hazard checks in site-2 and site-3: flood, landslide and wildfire maps.
2. US: look up your address in the free ASCE Hazard Tool. It gives ASCE 7 values for wind, tornado, seismic, ice, rain, flood, snow and tsunami.
3. Europe: wind, snow and earthquake values come from Eurocodes EN 1991-1-4, EN 1991-1-3 and EN 1998, each with the country's national annex.
4. The ESHM20 maps at hazard.efehr.org show earthquake hazard across Europe and the Mediterranean.
5. Australia: get the site wind class under AS 4055 and the Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) under AS 3959.
6. Elsewhere: ask the building authority which national code and hazard maps apply (legal-2).
7. Write one line per hazard: none, low, moderate or high, with its source and design value. Then open the matching step: wind design-25, earthquake design-26, flood design-27, wildfire design-28.

Do these first

• site-3

Sources

1. ASCE Hazard Tool (Building America Solution Center library entry). Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for US DOE, accessed 2026-11
2. Get Eurocodes and National Annexes. Calcs.com documentation, accessed 2026-11
3. Eurocode 8: Design of structures for earthquake resistance. European Commission Joint Research Centre (Eurocodes: Building the future), accessed 2026-11
4. ESHM20 Overview: 2020 European Seismic Hazard Model. European Facilities for Earthquake Hazard and Risk (EFEHR), accessed 2026-11
5. Technical Design Guide 40: Building Timber-framed Houses to Resist Wind. WoodSolutions, Forest and Wood Products Australia, accessed 2026-11
6. Construction of buildings in bushfire-prone areas (AS 3959). Housing Industry Association, Australia, accessed 2026-11

Open in the interactive guide