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Towards Large Scale Seismic Risk Assessment in Algeria: Case Study to the City of Blida

2019; IOP Publishing; Volume: 603; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/1757-899x/603/5/052065

1757-899X

Andrés Abarca, Ricardo Monteiro,

Flood Risk Assessment and Management

Abstract In recent years, the use of large scale seismic risk assessment has become increasingly popular to evaluate the fragility of a specific region to an earthquake event, through the convolution of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. These studies focus on the vulnerability of the built environment of the region and the evaluation of the human social dimension, which has great importance when determining the ability of a community to attend to a disaster and to eventually resume normal activities. This study, developed within the scope of the EU-funded project ITERATE (Improved Tools for Disaster Risk Mitigation in Algeria), focuses on the development of a web-based framework for integrated seismic risk assessment in Northern Algeria, primarily focused on the city of Blida, chosen as first case-study. For this purpose, alliances with local institutions, web-based data mining techniques and specifically developed research were used to obtain: an updated seismic hazard model, and exposure and vulnerability models for local buildings and bridges, which are proposed and implemented in a web-based platform which allows the calculation of the seismic risk at a municipal level in terms of probabilistic losses. Furthermore, a social vulnerability assessment is implemented at the same level and combined with the physical vulnerability to enable the identification of the regions that are more vulnerable to earthquakes. Such framework will, in turn, empower Algerian stakeholders to perform the evaluation of earthquake scenarios at a regional scale and provide valuable information to decision makers for the implementation of risk mitigation measures in vulnerable areas.