EAPSI:Assessing and Quantifying Resilience of Commercial Sectors to Natural Hazards

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This award supports research to assess and quantify the resilience of commercial buildings to natural hazards such as earthquakes. Up to this point, most attempts at understanding community resilience have focused on qualitatively assessing resilience in a broad over aching manner. While these methods are valuable they lack the ability to give stakeholders and decision makers specific information for planning and preparing for a disaster. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake caused severe damage to the Christchurch Central Business District (CDB). Studying the impact of the earthquake on the commercial buildings and the recovery decisions currently being made will be a valuable resource for understanding the impacts of future earthquakes in the United States. This project will provide a resilience metric specific for commercial buildings and the tools required to quantitatively measure resilience over time, providing predictive tools that can be used to understand vulnerabilities of commercial buildings, approximate damages and downtimes, and estimate recovery decisions. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ken Elwood, at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. The impacts of the February 2011 Earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, will serve as a case study to develop tools that can be used to assess vulnerabilities of commercial buildings and help predict future outcomes to communities similarly prone to natural hazards. The research will progress in three phases. The first phase is gathering and combining data previously collected in New Zealand and collecting additional data needed for the analysis. During the second phase fault trees and event trees, tools used in risk analysis, will be created to determine system failures, critical baseline events, and possible event sequences in the recovery process. Finally, the fault and event trees will be used to quantify community resilience by determining functionality over time, feeding into the developed resilience metric(s). The final product will be fault trees and event trees to be used by decision makers and engineers to predict potential damages from future earthquakes. This award is funded in collaboration with the Royal Society of New Zealand.