Earthquake Social Vulnerability Assessment Using Entropy Method

Abstract

Earthquake is the most devastating event in the current time. Given the probability of highly dangerous future events, risk estimation should be given focus by using the limited and freely available data to predict future vulnerable scenarios of an area that observe the involved uncertainty in the analysis. However, vulnerability assessments should be prospective and based on expected scientifically acceptable events. Therefore, we applied a valuable weight calculation approach called entropy to produce a social vulnerability map for a particular city. We used the population data, including educated and non-educated people and household information, to develop the earthquake social vulnerability map. We used entropy to evaluate the actual weight and produce a good quality map because of some difficulty in the fuzzy synthetic evaluation method for factor weight calculation and relationship ignorance among layers. Results showed that approximately 6% of the population is under very high vulnerability and around 14% are under high vulnerability areas in Banda Aceh City. The developed model is accurate by considering the inventory earthquake vulnerability map. The applied method was favorable, and the process provided good evaluation results, which was reasonable for earthquake hazard, vulnerability, and risk assessment.