Exposure and Vulnerability Assessment Via the Integration of Remote and in Situ Information: Case Study of Kyrgyzstan

Abstract eng:
The exposure and vulnerability of society and its various elements to natural hazards are the parameters that potentially display the most temporal dynamism. Therefore, there is a need for cost efficient and rapid means to obtain robust estimates of these factors. This is especially important for those societies and communities that lack both the financial and technical resources to undertake detailed surveys, while building-by-building assessments are, in any case, not feasible for even the richest economies. The work presented here outlines a procedure combining top-down and bottom-up approaches to develop models of physical exposure and vulnerability for seismic risk assessment purposes. The proposed procedure integrates information automatically extracted from remote sensing sources with other already available ancillary sources in order to optimize the collection of in-situ data. The use of mobile mapping systems, along with modern web-based technologies and geostatistical analysis allows for a very prompt and reliable characterization of the built-up environment, paramount to the subsequent quantitative risk estimation stage. The resulting model of the residential building stock is then associated to a suitable set of vulnerability curves describing the expected propensity of the considered building types to be damaged (or to collapse) when exposed to different levels of ground motion. An empirical approach has been followed, which is originally derived from the formulation of EMS-98 macroseismic intensity. Results from the use of these data source types and tools are presented for the case of the urban environment of Kyrgyzstan, which in recent decades has undergone rapid and, in many cases, unplanned growth. The tools and systems presented here have been successfully employed in a World Bank-supported project aimed at Measuring Seismic Risk in the Kyrgyz Republic.

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