Wellington building inventory: Rapid earthquake response framework

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2020
Authors
Ghasemi, Amin
Stephens, Max
Elwood, Ken
Abstract

This research is focused on regional building responses to earthquakes and identification of broad vulnerability archetypes to allow for development of high-level retrofit strategies to increase resilience and limit human and economic loss. Wellington has been selected as the case study for this research due to the unique access to building data within the central business district. In the first phase of this research, a ‘rough’ near real-time seismic impact framework was designed to identify the response of buildings to an earthquake. This framework showcases the consequences on the Wellington building inventory caused by an earthquake by comparing accelerations recorded at GNS strong motion stations to building design accelerations both at the SLS and ULS levels. The outputs of the framework are presented on an interactive map, which facilitates the different stakeholders, i.e., building owners and decision-makers to provide a rough estimation of the severity of building-level seismic impacts. The next phase of the research is focused on two main objectives: (1) quantifying the direct repair costs associated with earthquake damage to common structural vulnerabilities in terms of annual monetary loss and disruption and (2) proposing high-level retrofit strategies to reduce financial and human loss. To address these objectives, ongoing work is focused on identifying structural vulnerabilities common among Wellington buildings, and classifying the buildings in the inventory into the vulnerability groups using high-level clustering methods. Candidate buildings from each vulnerability group will be selected for detailed modeling, and the seismic response of these buildings will be quantified to develop high-level retrofit strategies to mitigate the social/financial risks of Wellington buildings.

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