Earthquake Loss Process

Earthquake loss process. (From Scawthorn, C., Earthquake risk management An overview, in Earthquake Engineering Handbook, Chen, W.-F. and Scawthorn, C, Eds., CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2003, p. 2-7.)... 

INCIDENT CAUSES. Incident causes or initiating events should be readily identifiable in any PrHA method. Reviewers should use their experience to assure that all initiating events, including hardware failure modes, operator errors, administrative errors, and loss of utilities, are considered. If the process is in a location subject to external events, the PrHA should include relevant events such as earthquakes, traffic, weather, or accidents at an adjacent process. 

Man and machine are embedded in their environment. The latter is the third important cornerstone within the basic cybernetic model. Accidents and loss on the part of the machine, caused by the operation of the machine by man, may have a deleterious effect on the environment. On the other hand, there are a multitude of natural processes within the environment, eg., earthquakes and disastrous storms, etc., as well as disasters of a technical origin, like fires or explosions, which have a damaging effect on the machine. 

Estimation of losses in urban areas from future earthquakes is essential for disaster preparedness and decision making at the local, regional and national levels of government. The process of loss estimation due to earthquakes involves different analyses, such as seismic hazard assessment, estimation of earthquake characteristics on the ground surface, vulnerability and fragility analyses of structures and human casualties. Various numerical and empirical methods have been developed over the past years to perform each of these analyses yet, few attempts have been made to combine the whole process into a single computer code. 

Murakami, H., Takimito, K., Pomonis, A. 2012. Tsunami Evacuation Process and Human Loss Distribution in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake— A Case Study of Natori City, Miyagi Prefecture. 15 WCEE, Lisbon, Portugal, 10 pp. 

Regarding natural disasters, there are processes that at times cannot be controlled (earthquakes, flooding, volcano eruptions, etc.), and eventually cause major human and material loss. 

As part of the GEM, there has been an emphasis for the first time to review how one could assess the socio-economic impact of earthquakes in loss estimation. The ambition of GEM is to deliver methods, metrics, and open source software that can be used worldwide to explore the compounded nature of earthquake events where environmental processes blend with factors such as urban growth, marginalization, and poverty to bring about and magnify earthquake impacts. The integration of physical risk with (a) the social characteristics of populations and (b) the susceptibility of people to the adverse impacts of earthquakes leads to an encompassing perspective on global risk assessment which ... 

Earthquake CAT modeling is an integrated process of COTiducting numerical simulations of earthquake occurrence, ground motion prediction, damage assessment, and seismic loss calculation. It typically involves (i) inventory/ exposure database, (ii) hazard characterization,... 

Many examples of cascading effects caused by earthquakes can be cited as, for example, the well-known cases of tsunamis triggered by earthquakes or earthquake-triggered landslides. As described in the previous section, there may be different typologies of interactions, and the physical processes involved in these interactions are extremely case dependent. In this section, we describe some outstanding cases of interactions (mainly at the hazard level) that highlight the potential loss amplifications that these triggering effects may produce. 

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