Landslide Risk: Economic Valuation in the North-Eastern Zone of Medellin City

Natural disasters of a geodynamic nature can cause enormous economic and human losses. The economic costs of a landslide disaster include relocation of communities and physical repair of urban infrastructure. However, when performing a quantitative risk analysis, generally, the indirect economic consequences of such an event are not taken into account. A probabilistic approach methodology that considers several scenarios of hazard and vulnerability to measure the magnitude of the landslide and to quantify the economic costs is proposed. With this approach, it is possible to carry out a quantitative evaluation of the risk by landslides, allowing the calculation of the economic losses before a potential disaster in an objective, standardized and reproducible way, taking into account the uncertainty of the building costs in the study zone. The possibility of comparing different scenarios facilitates the urban planning process, the optimization of interventions to reduce risk to acceptable levels and an assessment of economic losses according to the magnitude of the damage. For the development and explanation of the proposed methodology, a simple case study is presented, located in north-eastern zone of the city of Medellín. This area has particular geomorphological characteristics, and it is also characterized by the presence of several buildings in bad structural conditions. The proposed methodology permits to obtain an estimative of the probable economic losses by earthquake-induced landslides, taking into account the uncertainty of the building costs in the study zone. The obtained estimative shows that the structural intervention of the buildings produces a reduction the order of 21 % in the total landslide risk. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

Safety of buried steel natural gas pipelines under earthquake-induced ground shaking:a review

Evidence from past earthquakes suggests that damage inflicted to buried natural gas (NG) pipelines can cause long service disruptions, leading to unpredictably high socioeconomic losses in unprepared communities. In this review paper, we aim to critically revisit recent progress in the demanding field of seismic analysis, design and resilience assessment of buried steel NG pipelines. For this purpose, the existing literature and code provisions are surveyed and discussed while challenges and gaps are identified from a research, industrial and legislative perspective. It is underscored that, in contrast to common belief, transient ground deformations in non-uniform sites are not necessarily negligible and can induce undesirable deformations in the pipe, overlooked in the present standards of practice. It is further highlighted that the current seismic fragility framework is rich in empirical fragility relations but lacks analytical and experimental foundations that would permit the reliable assessment of the different parameters affecting the expected pipe damage rates. Pipeline network resilience is still in a developing stage, thus only few assessment methodologies are available whereas absent is a holistic approach to support informed decision-making towards the necessary mitigation measures. Nevertheless, there is ground for improvement by adapting existing knowledge from research on other types of lifeline networks, such as transportation networks. All above aspects are discussed and directions for future research are provided.</p

Fragility Curves for Assessing the Resilience of Electricity Networks Constructed from an Extensive Fault Database

Robust infrastructure networks are vital to ensure community resilience; their failure leads to severe societal disruption and they have important postdisaster functions. However, as these networks consist of interconnected, but geographically-distributed, components, system resilience is difficult to assess. In this paper the authors propose the use of an extension to the catastrophe (CAT) risk modeling approach, which is primarily used to perform risk assessments of independent assets, to be adopted for these interdependent systems. To help to achieve this, fragility curves, a crucial element of CAT models, are developed for overhead electrical lines using an empirical approach to ascribe likely failures due to wind storm hazard. To generate empirical fragility curves for electrical overhead lines, a dataset of over 12,000 electrical failures is coupled to a European reanalysis (ERA) wind storm model, ERA-Interim. The authors consider how the spatial resolution of the electrical fault data affects these curves, generating a fragility curve with low resolution fault data with a R2R2 value of 0.9271 and improving this to a R2R2 value of 0.9889 using higher spatial resolution data. Recommendations for deriving similar fragility curves for other infrastructure systems and/or hazards using the same methodological approach are also made. The authors argue that the developed fragility curves are applicable to other regions with similar electrical infrastructure and wind speeds, although some additional calibration may be required