Earthquake Disaster Resilience - From Mitigation to Recovery

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The world has experienced unprecedented losses from earthquakes in recent years. For Christchurch, New Zealand, a community very similar to many Canadian cities, the impacts of the February 2011 M6.3 earthquake include an estimated $20 billion in direct financial loss, demolition of ~70% of downtown buildings including loss of more than 50% of heritage structures, closure of the CBD for over 18 months, and outmigration of thousands of residents. Canadian municipalities have recognized their vulnerability to similar losses and strive to develop programs to improve their resiliency. This proposal provides a comprehensive research program to improve our basic understanding of the performance of building structures during earthquakes, with an end goal of enhancing earthquake disaster resilience of Canadian communities by address three research themes: (1) mitigation of existing vulnerable buildings, (2) performance enhancements for new designs, and (3) improved methods for post-earthquake evaluation. This research program will contribute to (1) by seeking to identify the characteristics of older concrete buildings closely correlated with collapse potential. Research on (2) will focus on two sub-topics: first, losses from past earthquakes will be compared with the additional capital costs of achieving higher performance from structural systems as a means of providing rationale for changes to the performance objectives of the Building Code; second, popular structural systems (e.g. concrete core wall buildings) will be evaluated to determine how they may be modified to achieve better damage tolerance for limited changes in design approaches. Finally, for (3), an essential component to disaster resilience is the ability to efficiently evaluate damaged buildings without undue conservatism such that they can be reoccupied as quickly as possible. This need will be addressed through the correlation of building residual capacity and measurable damage metrics such as crack widths and non-destructive test measurements. A notable original aspect integral to the entire research program is the use of empirical evidence from the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake to validate models and ensure relevance of research findings for engineering practice.