Wellington Building Inventory: Rapid Earthquake Response Framework

Abstract

This paper is focused on the design and implementation of a functional tool to evaluate and communicate the seismic risk to increase resilience and reduce human and economic loss. Wellington has been selected as the case study for this research due to the existence of a robust database of buildings within the central business district. In the first phase of this research, a high-level near real-time seismic impact framework is designed to identify the response of buildings to an earthquake. This scenario and planning framework showcases the consequences on the Wellington building inventory caused by an earthquake by comparing accelerations recorded at GNS strong motion stations in the city to building design accelerations. The outputs of the framework facilitate the different stakeholders, i.e., building owners and decision-makers, to provide a rough estimation of the severity of building-level seismic impacts. This research presents the first phase of a larger research programme focused on: (1) quantifying the direct repair costs associated with region-wide earthquake damage to buildings with common structural and non-structural vulnerabilities in terms of expected annual monetary loss and disruption and (2) identifying evidence-driven retrofit priorities by systematically removing vulnerabilities from the building stock, and re-evaluating the repair and downtime costs across the region.