Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2020

Abstract

Despite the increasing adoption of Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) in seismic risk assessment and design of buildings, earthquakes resulted in around 1.8 million injuries (three times the number of fatalities) over the past two decades. Several existing PBEE-based methodologies use rudimentary models that may not accurately estimate earthquake-induced casualties. Even when models are suitable for predicting the total number of fatalities and critical injuries, they may fail to adequately differentiate between different levels of injury severity. This paper draws attention to the importance of extending the seismic casualty assessment method by broadening the perspective on injury severity. To this cause, a probabilistic model is developed to predict fatalities and injuries due to earthquakes. The proposed model adopts the FEMA P-58 framework for risk assessment and considers six injury severity levels (minor, moderate, serious, severe, critical and fatal), in accordance with the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). The aforementioned framework evaluates the casualty risk with five modules: seismic hazard analysis, structural analysis and response evaluation (using incremental dynamic analysis), building collapse simulation, detailed casualty assessment caused by structural, nonstructural, and content components of the building, and injury severity assessment. The injury severity assessment module assumes two modes of injury: occupants falling on the floor resulting in injury and injuries caused by unstable building contents hitting occupants as a result of sliding or overturning. The framework uses an occupant-time location model to predict the number of injuries and a set of building content fragility curves for sliding and overturning failure modes, developed by the incremental dynamic analyses. The proposed model was applied to a case study of a reinforced concrete, moment-frame office building furnished with 21 different content objects. The results show that the frequency of injuries resulting in hospitalization can be up to 30 times more than that of the fatal injuries at low shaking intensity levels and may amplify by 20 times at high intensity shaking.

Comments

This paper was presented at the 17th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, 17WCEE

Sendai, Japan - September 13th to 18th 2020

Download

Share

COinS