Seismic Policy, Operations, and Research Uses for a Building Inventory in an Earthquake-Prone City
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ARTICLE
Seismic Policy, Operations, and Research Uses for a Building Inventory in an Earthquake-Prone City Ken Elwood1 • Olga Filippova2 • Ilan Noy3 • Jacob Pastor Paz3
Accepted: 10 October 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract After the 2016 New Zealand Kaikoura Earthquake, the absence of information about the state of buildings in Wellington proved to be a source of significant policy uncertainty. Authorities did not know what damages to expect and therefore how to react, and policies needed to be formulated without a clear quantification of the risks. Moreover, without detailed knowledge of the existing buildings, it was difficult to assess what the available legal and regulatory tools can achieve and choose among them. We describe the creation of a building inventory database for Wellington initiated by the authors. This database aims to assist the generation of research on the risks, impacts, and viable solutions for reducing future seismic risk in Wellington’s central business district (CBD). The database includes structural, economic, and market information on virtually every significant building in the CBD. Its primary purposes are: to collate and provide the best available information about the expected seismic performance of the existing building stock; to assess the impact of possible multiple building failures due to a seismic event; to describe a viable cost-effective path for seismic retrofitting; and to inform the design of a regulatory structure that can facilitate this resilience-building agenda.
& Ilan Noy [email protected] 1
School of Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
2
Business School, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
3
School of Economics, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Keywords Building inventory Building standards Disaster risk assessment Earthquake-prone city Retrofit
1 Introduction New Zealand shares its seismic risk profile with many other countries that are located along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Approximately 81% of the world’s largest earthquakes have occurred along the ring, resulting in it being labelled as the most earthquake-prone region in the world (USGS 2014). Awareness of the risks posed by such seismic activity has heightened in the recent past as a result of the several significant earthquakes that have occurred along these fault lines. These include the 2010 earthquake in Chile and the March 2011 earthquake in Japan and ensuing tsunamis after both events. New Zealand itself is on high alert following a string of destructive events in the Canterbury region in 2010–2011, the 2013 Seddon Earthquake, and the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake. Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, is situated just north of where two tectonic plates, the Pacific and Australian plates, collide (see Fig. 1). The Wellington fault runs through the central part of the city, passing under lifeline infrastructure and densely developed areas (Fig. 1). Inherently, the city
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