This paper presents a methodology to evaluate life safety risk of coastal communities vulnerable to seismic and tsunami hazards. The work explicitly incorporates two important aspects in tsunami evacuation modeling: (1) the effect of earthquake-induced damage to buildings on building egress time, (2) the effect of earthquake-induced debris on horizontal evacuation time. The city of Seaside, Oregon, is selected as a testbed community. The hazard is based on a megathrust earthquake and tsunami from the Cascadia Subduction Zone that was defined in a previous study. The built environment consists of buildings and the transportation network for the city. Fragility analysis is used to estimate the seismic damage to buildings and resulting debris that covers portions of the road network. The horizontal evacuation time is determined based on the shortest path to shelters, including the increased travel time due to the earthquake-generated debris. The effects of different mitigation strategies are quantified. Results indicate the fatality and life safety risk of a near-field tsunami increases by 4.2 to 8.3 times when the effects of building egress and earthquake-induced debris are considered. The choice of population layer affects the life safety risk and thus the maximum risk is obtained when daytime populations are considered. Use of mitigation strategies result in a significant decrease in the number of fatalities. For hazards with recurrence intervals larger than 500-years, the vertical evacuation is the most effective strategy in reducing fatalities and associated risks. Implementing all mitigation strategies reduces the life safety risk by 90%.
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.