Probabilistic Seismic Risk Assessment in South America

Abstract eng:
This paper presents a probabilistic seismic risk assessment for the residential building stock in South American countries prone to earthquakes: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Average annual economic loss maps, mean loss exceedance curves per country, and statistics that reveal which building classes are most vulnerable to earthquakes are some of the examined results. An event-based simulation approach was employed for the calculation of the economic losses and physical damage of buildings, considering a wide spectrum of uncertainties. A comprehensive logic tree was used in order to incorporate the epistemic uncertainty in the selection of the ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) in accordance with the existing tectonic regimes; and for the vulnerability model, sets of fragility curves developed for each building class specified in the exposure model account for both the record-to-record and building-tobuilding variability. The results obtained in this study are a crucial step towards the reduction of seismic risk, as they are essential for understanding how earthquake threat is distributed across South America.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket