Abstract:Medellín is the second largest city of Colombia with more than 2 million inhabitants according to the latest census and with more than 240,000 public and private buildings. It is located on an intermediate seismic hazard area according to the seismic hazard map of Colombia although no destructive earthquakes have recently occurred having as a consequence low seismic risk awareness among its inhabitants. Using the results of a fully probabilistic risk assessment of the city with a building by building resolution level and considering the dynamic soil response, average annual losses by sectors as well as casualties and other direct effects have been obtained and aggregated at county level. Using the holistic evaluation module of the multi-hazard risk assessment CAPRA platform, EvHo, a comprehensive assessment that considered the social fragility and lack or resilience at county level was performed making use of a set of indicators with the objective of capturing the aggravating conditions of the initial physical impact. The Urban Seismic Risk Index has been obtained at county level being useful to communicate risk to decision-makers and stakeholders besides making easy to identify potential zones that can be problematic in terms of several dimensions of the vulnerability. This case study is an example of how a multidisciplinary research on disaster risk reduction has helped to show how risk analysis can be of high relevance for decision-making processes in disaster risk management.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.