Deepening the understanding of earthquake risk in tall buildings in Vancouver for regional risk assessment and policy design
The City of Vancouver has more high-rise residential buildings per capital than any other city in North America. It is also known for its high seismicity, which poses significant challenge to the city as many of its older residential structures can experience substantial damage and even collapse under a major earthquake. For these densely populated structures where large casualty and evacuation can result from a major earthquake, hospitalization, as well as temporary and long-term housing needs can put the city’s healthcare and housing systems into severe distress.
As part of the technical team for Vancouver’s seismic resilience plan, Kinetica Risk collaborated with local experts from the academia and city officials to develop high resolution vulnerability assessment of reinforced concrete tall buildings across the City of Vancouver as part of its seismic resilience plan. High-fidelity models were developed for representative archetypes of tall residential structures built in different eras and with various known deficiencies. Using performance-based analysis, we developed high resolution vulnerability assessment for each archetype that captures safety, financial and downtime risk, and identified the risk drivers that should be targeted for mitigation. The vulnerability assessment can be readily integrated into city’s existing regional risk model to enhance the resolution of risk assessment on this specific high-consequent building stock. In addition, our work also developed and assessed potential mitigation options for each archetype and quantified the cost and benefits of each in order to support the policy design for improving public safety and post-disaster recovery.
