Improving the resilience of existing built assets to earthquake induced liquefaction disaster events

Abstract

LIQUEFACT was a EU H2020 funded project to investigate earthquake induced liquefaction potential across Europe and develop a series of tools to understand better the impacts that earthquake induced liquefaction disaster events have on the resilience of built assets and communities. A resilience assessment and improvement framework was developed to provide the theoretical underpinning for the LIQUEFACT project and to provide practical guidance on the assessment of built assets to Earthquake Induced Liquefaction Disaster events through the LIQUEFACT software tool and built asset management planning framework. This paper outlines the theoretical basis to the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management planning framework and presents the results from a validation exercise through their application to a hypothetical healthcare scenario. The paper also describes the different stages of the research that led to the definition of the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management planning framework. To this end the paper concludes that the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management framework provide a longitudinal, holistic view of disaster vulnerability and resilience that can inform the selection of ground improvement mitigation actions to improve business continuity and resilience planning.

Improving organisational resilience: the TURNkey project

“…In the first PAR cycle, a series of semi-structured interviews were held with key employees, including facilities managers, from a range of business types located across Europe to better understand their current approaches to earthquake disaster risk management and explore their requirements (both technical and operational) of the TURNkey FWCR Platform. These interviews were based around a series of hypothetical earthquake scenarios derived from the literature [24] and integrated into the concept model described in the previous section. Businesses included local production focused organisations that were part of global corporations; service delivery organisations that operated across geographical regions; business sector specific organisations that collectively constituted significant employment in a region; critical infrastructure providers; and small business organisations.…”

“…The TURNkey project explored the relationships between vulnerability, resilience, adaptive capacity and risk through the development and testing of a prototype earthquake forecasting, early warning and consequence response platform to assist decision makers (businesses, critical infrastructure providers and civil protection agencies) better understand their business risks and develop mitigation interventions to manage the risks [9]. Whilst the practical implications of the TURNkey project have been reported elsewhere [10,11], this paper examines the practical challenge of integrating a system like the TURNkey Platform into disaster management, emergency management and business continuity planning from a facilities management perspective. In particular, the paper presents a usecase approach to identifying end-user needs and expectations of the TURNkey FWCR (Forecasting, Warning and Consequence Response) platform, and presents a hypothetical case study of the integration of the TURNkey FWCR platform into a typical hospital's disaster/emergency management and business continuity plans.…”

Cost–benefit analysis to appraise technical mitigation options for earthquake-induced liquefaction disaster events

“…Finally, whilst this paper has outlined a number of generic approaches to modelling CBA for disaster events, the authors could find no specific examples of how liquefaction induced damage levels could be converted in monetary losses to support liquefaction risk mitigation options appraisal. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by exploring the application of the CBA technique to appraise technical interventions to reduce liquefaction-related losses as part of a resilience assessment and improvement framework (RAIF) (Jones et al , 2021). The main objective of the paper is to discuss the potential issues faced by researchers and practitioners seeking to develop CBA methodologies for liquefaction risk mitigation option appraisal.…”

A computational platform to assess liquefaction-induced loss at critical infrastructures scale

“…The development of the LIQUEFACT software involved the incorporation of data and state-of-the-art methodologies. Specifically, this refers to liquefaction susceptibility level maps (Lai et al 2019a(Lai et al , b, 2020aMeslem et al 2019a, d), methodologies and results of liquefaction vulnerability analysis for both building typologies and critical infrastructures (Viana da Fonseca et al 2018a, b;Millen et al 2018Millen et al , 2019aMeslem et al 2019b, d), liquefaction mitigation measures as well as cost-benefit considerations (Jones et al 2019(Jones et al , 2020Meslem et al 2019c, d). The development process of the LIQUEFACT software has also benefited from the comparative investigation that was carried out for the existing earthquake-induced liquefaction analysis programmes and software, and helped in developing ideas regarding the attributes that the LIQUEFACT software should feature, and implement most appropriate design strategy.…”

“…The LIQUEFACT software development was also based on various detailed feedbacks on both the engineering science and practical usefulness of each feature incorporated in the tool. The development has also been validated during workshops (International Expert Advisory Panel review workshops, several workshops with urban planners, facility managers, structural and geotechnical engineers, or risk modelers) and tested at various sites (published by different project's partners) during the LIQUE-FACT project lifetime (Modoni et al 2019a(Modoni et al , 2019bPaolella et al 2019Paolella et al , 2020Jones et al 2020;Oztoprak et al 2019;Quintero et al 2019).…”