How are the Essential Facilities classifications represented in the General Building Stock?
In HAZUS, Essential Facilities are site specific data that include medical care facilities, police stations, fire stations, emergency operation centers, and schools. Because these are “buildings”, they are represented as aggregated data in the General Building Stock. You can think of Essential Facilities as being an extraction from the General Building Stock because of it’s special significance. Technically, however, the data is derived from different sources. See the metadata for more on the data sources. Essential Facility classification and General Building Stock classifications are different, but can be associated. One word of caution is to not double-count results for Essential Facilities and General Building Stock. It is OK to report both, so long as it is clear that they are not to be added, but rather one (Essential Facilities) is, theoretically, an extraction from the other (General Building Stock).
