Seismic Policy, Operations, and Research Uses for a Building Inventory in an Earthquake-Prone City

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.

A framework for the prediction of earthquake using federated learning

“…Regional seismic data collection involves data privacy, data availability and data communication concerns imposed by data protection legislations ( Enachescu, 2007 ; Elwood et al, 2020 ). To mitigate these challenges the concept of FL has been proposed ( Aledhari et al, 2020 ).…”

“…It also evoked major issues about data privacy, data availability, data security, data protection, and data reliability. Seismic data is one of the most valuable resources, and agencies usually avoid data sharing due to data protection legislations about the sensitive nature of data ( Elwood et al, 2020 ; Enachescu, 2007 ). International agencies provide open access satellite datasets with reasonable accuracy but its high cost and the issue of indigenous knowledge (IK) poses a great challenge in terms of data capturing, storage and distribution.…”

“…Many societies in third-world countries lack the technicality processes of managing the IK. Due to these problems onsite regional seismic data acquisition is more popular ( Zhao et al, 2020 ; Elwood et al, 2020 ).…”

A framework for assessing impaired seismic performance as a trigger for repair

“…reached similar conclusions and found that aftershock effects are heavily influenced by the detailing of RC components. Through review of numerous experimental studies on components, Elwood et al 21 . showed that the deformation capacity of ductile (modern detailing) RC frame components is largely unaffected by cyclic loading that does not exceed 2% drift.…”

Prioritising earthquake retrofitting in Wellington, New Zealand

“…Reinforced concrete was used in New Zealand from the early 1900s (Reed, Schoonees, and Salmond, 2008), but became more prevalent following the decline of unreinforced masonry in the 1930s, after many such buildings collapsed in the Hawke's Bay earthquake of 1931. Buildings with precast floors also comprise a large proportion of commercial building stock in Wellington, although some of them have been converted more recently from commercial to residential use (Elwood et al, 2020).…”