Earthquake Loss Estimation Using State-of-the-Art Tools

Abstract

Seismic hazards cause significant damages to infrastructure, lifelines, buildings and life, especially in urban areas. Seismic risk calculation can play an important role in situations of hazard and can help to bring down the human and economic losses due to earthquakes. It helps in predicting the probability of the building and structural damage and economic losses according to potential seismic hazard in an area. The estimated risk profile then can be used to bring forward design methods for new buildings, to reinforce the current buildings, and to effectively overcome catastrophic situations. This paper aims to compare the seismic risk of different building model types and occupancy classes according to the Hazus-MH 2.1 classification and also quantify the uncertainty by considering a suite of earthquakes. The normalized damage and loss models are developed using Performance-Based Engineering (PBE), an extensible workflow application developed by SimCenter Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI).