Scenario-Based Comprehensive Assessment for Community Resilience Adapted to Fire following an Earthquake, Implementing the Analytic Network Process and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enriched Evaluation II Techniques

Natural hazards bring significant influences on and socioeconomic loss to cities and communities. Historic events show that fire following earthquake (FFE) is the most influential uncertain disturbance on the urban infrastructure system. Under the FFE scenario, the concept of resilience is widely implemented to make up the shortcomings derived from the traditional disaster management methodology. Resilient cities and communities are required to improve the systemic performance in responding to the FFE. To fulfill these goals, measuring community resilience is an essential work for municipal policy makers. Therefore, this study conducted a comprehensive assessment on community resilience adapted to the FFE scenario. The systematic literature review (SLR) was employed to identify the indicators, and the analytic network process (ANP) technique was implemented to determine their weights. 20 indicators were extracted, and 4 communities that encountered FFE in China were selected for the empirical analysis. Thereafter, the preference ranking organization method for enriched evaluation (PROMETHEE) II technique was selected through using the multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods selection framework to fulfill the comprehensive assessment. The results were discussed and demonstrated with graphical analysis for interactive aid (GAIA) technique. The findings revealed that the G Community won the highest score and had the strongest performance. However, H Community had the lowest score and the weakest performance. The proposed comprehensive methods could benefit the decision-makers and the policy executors achieving the community resilience adapted to the FFE scenario by improving the effective indicators.

Fire Following Earthquake in the catastrophe models: Case study – Vancouver region, Canada

<p>Fire following earthquake (FFE) can pose considerable threat in densely populated urban area with significant earthquake hazard and presence of non-fire-resistant buildings typology. Severe building damage and consequently broken pipelines can lead to release of flammable gasses and liquid, which increase possibility of fire occurrence when they come into contact with ignition sources, like short circuits or open flames. Numerous simultaneous ignitions followed by uncontrolled fire spread to adjacent buildings can lead to major fires and conflagrations, whose damage can substantially exceed the earthquake shaking damage. Well-known example of such high financial losses due to FFE is Mw 7.9 San Francisco 1906, where Great Fire losses were 10 times higher than due to earthquake shaking itself. Thus, the quantification of FFE losses has particularly important role for the current underwriting products and the industry requires their further detailed consideration in the catastrophe models and pricing approaches. Impact Forecasting, Aon’s catastrophe model development centre of excellence, has been committed to help (re)insurers on that matter.</p><p>This paper presents quantification of FFE contribution to mean losses for case study of the Vancouver region, Canada for specific scenario Mw 7.5 Strait of Georgia crustal earthquake. FFE methodology encompasses 3 phases: ignitions, fire spread and suppression and loss estimation. Number of ignitions (fires that require fire department response) and their location were calculated using HAZUS empirical equation with input variables earthquake shaking intensity and estimated total building floor area. An urban fire spread is a complicated phenomenon that includes numerous uncertainties. An advanced cellular automata (CA) engine is used for simulation of the fire spread and suppression based on Zhao 2011. The CA engine represents collection of grid-arranged cells, where each grid cell changes state as a function of time according to a defined set of rules that includes the states of adjacent cells. The CA simulations include only matrix mathematical operations that allow us to take into account building construction types and their damage due to earthquake shaking, meteorological and environmental data and fire suppression modifiers. Unlike in older empirical approach, the fire spread CA engine enable to consider fire spread not only from initially ignited building as well as fire developing within a single building, building-to-building fire spread, and fire extinguishing works at the same time. An output of CA engine is the building fire-state grades based on which damage functions are created with PGA as input parameter at the level of 3-digit postal codes. For the chosen scenario potential contribution to mean loss due to FFE could be up to 75% depending on typical buildings setting within 3-digit postal codes.</p>

Fire Following Earthquake—The Potential in Istanbul

Fire following earthquake is a little recognized risk in seismic regions with significant wood building inventories. Methods exist for quantifying this risk, and examples are provided in this chapter for San Francisco, Istanbul and Montreal. There are many opportunities for reducing this risk, and examples are provided regarding reducing fire station vulnerability and improving emergency firefighting water supply. Once accomplished however, vigilance is required to maintain these mitigation measures.

Reliability Assessment Model of Water Distribution Networks against Fire Following Earthquake (FFE)

Fire following earthquake (FFE) is a common secondary disaster that can inflict great damage to humans. A large number of seismic resilience evaluation methods have been proposed, but few of them consider the influence of FFE. In this study, a multi-scenario simulation based model was developed to evaluate the post-disaster performance of water distribution networks (WDNs) in supplying both firefighting flow and original demand under the effect of seismic damage and FFEs. Hypothetical earthquakes were generated and the spatial–temporal distribution of FFEs was simulated by the Poisson distribution model and the Weibull distribution model. The post-disaster performance was evaluated by two types of seismic reliability metrics. The developed model was applied to a WDN currently operating in China with eight pre-determined earthquake scenarios. The results showed that the firefighting flow was concentrated in the first few hours after the earthquake. Thus, the serviceability of both original demand and firefighting flow was influenced significantly within the first few hours, while little impact was observed after the concentrated firefighting flow was delivered. The proposed model quantified the WDN’s performance under specific seismic damage and potential FFEs, and can be used for the planning, design, and maintenance of WDNs.