Modeling the fine-scale spatiotemporal pattern of earthquake casualties in cities: Application to Haidian District, Beijing

Abstract

China is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes and has suffered a great number of earthquake casualties. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective earthquake casualty assessment methods for pre-disaster preparedness and emergency management. However, there are many problems with existing approaches to earthquake casualty assessment in China. This study developed an improved earthquake casualty assessment methodology by incorporating the estimation of population exposure at a more appropriate spatiotemporal scale, the locally oriented damage probability matrices, and the quantitative relationship between casualties and building damage. The proposed methodology can improve the spatial and temporal accuracy and the speed of earthquake casualty evaluation on a large scale. Through a case study of Haidian District in Beijing, we used this methodology to estimate the daytime and nighttime casualties at the 500 m × 500 m grid and block scale. Our proposed model was able to identify areas where earthquake casualties were likely to be higher, necessitating higher priority for pre-disaster mitigation, preparedness, and emergency response activities. It is expected that the model will be used to evaluate earthquake casualties in other parts of China.