An Interdisciplinary Approach for Regional Seismic Damage Estimation

Abstract eng:
In order to mitigate seismic risk in urban regions, the first task is to identify potential seismic losses in future earthquakes. Seismic loss estimation is an interdisciplinary framework including a wide range of contributions from geophysical and earthquake engineers, physical and economic planners to insurance companies. In this study, a moderate size city in Turkey, namely Erzincan, is modeled completely from geophysical attributes to the built environment. Erzincan city is on the eastern part of the North Anatolian Fault zone and it is located in the close vicinity of a triple conjunction of major fault systems within a basin structure. The city experienced two major events in the twentieth century; Ms8.0 in 1939 and Mw=6.6 in 1992. Hence as a study area, the city under concern has significant hazard potential. The main components of the study are probabilistic and deterministic seismic hazard assessment and estimation of potential ground motions, regional building fragility information for residential buildings and damage estimation by using the generated fragility functions. The initial results are in terms of key components such as construction of soil profiles, ground motion simulations of past earthquakes and scenario events, site-specific probabilistic seismic hazard analyses and fragility functions derived using regional building characteristics along with simulated regional ground motion data. The proposed approach is examined by comparing the observed damage and the estimated damage for the 1992 event, for which the results seem to have a reasonable match in between. After verification, the seismic damage distribution in the city for scenario event of Mw=7 is hypothetically calculated as a case study for potential damage prediction. The estimated damage levels in the city center reveals that Erzincan is under significant seismic threat due to its close distance from the fault system in the North, soft soil conditions within Erzincan basin as well as the seismic vulnerability of the building stock in the region. Finally, a brief discussion on the applicability of EMS-98 building types, vulnerability classes and damage grades to the proposed methodology is presented.

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