ABSTRACT

Quantifying the anticipated community performance after an earthquake is an important part of planning for and developing community resilience.  Widespread access restrictions due to safety cordons around heavily damaged buildings can significantly impact the recovery process, as was seen in L’Aquila in 2009 and in Christchurch in 2011.  The proposed framework assesses building accessibility throughout a community’s post-earthquake recovery, including the impact of safety cordons around damaged tall buildings.  Building-level performance-based engineering assessments (FEMA P-58 and REDi) are extended to the community level, using geospatial information to consider both regional-scale ground shaking and neighborhood-scale access restrictions.  The framework is applied to downtown San Francisco to evaluate the relative benefit of various mitigation policies.  Ongoing research is leveraging San Francisco’s Tall Building Inventory to develop more detailed building models for the most common structural system: pre-Northridge Steel Moment Frames.  The fracture-prone welded connections are incorporated through a fiber-section approach.  These buildings models will be used in the San Francisco case study to identify damage patterns that correspond to increased probability of collapse, triggering the need for a safety cordon.

BIOGRAPHY

Anne Hulsey is a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Auckland, where she focuses on earthquake engineering research that supports communities as they develop resilience strategies.  This interest had been cultivated during internships with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  Anne holds a PhD from Stanford University and a master’s degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs.