Building damage characteristics based on surveyed data and fragility curves of the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami

Abstract

A large amount of buildings was damaged or destroyed by the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami. Numerous field surveys were conducted in order to collect the tsunami inundation extents and building damage data in the affected areas. Therefore, this event provides us with one of the most complete data set among tsunami events in history. In this study, fragility functions are derived using data provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation of Japan, with more than 250,000 structures surveyed. The set of data has details on damage level, structural material, number of stories per building and location (town). This information is crucial to the understanding of the causes of building damage, as differences in structural characteristics and building location can be taken into

Tsunami Inundation Modeling: Sensitivity of Velocity and Momentum Flux to Bottom Friction With Application to Building Damage at Seaside, Oregon

“…After the 2011 tsunami, various research groups were organized to estimate the specific damage levels of buildings and the corresponding maximum flow depths or runups with field surveys. Based on those survey data, various fragility curves were developed for the various damage levels, structure materials, sizes, or locations (Suppasri, et al, 2013). The maximum flow depth is widely used as the intensity measure to estimate damage levels in fragility curves, despite the limitation that flow depth cannot directly represent the tsunami force.…”

“…Wiebe and Cox (2014) provided estimates for damage costs for a hypothetical tsunami at Seaside, OR, and they showed how fragility curves for RC and wood structures provide different insights toward damage levels and corresponding costs over the inundation area. They applied fragility curves from Suppasri et al (2013), which are only depth oriented curves.…”

“…Figures 10a, b, and c show the three representative types of fragility curves from Koshimura et al (2009) (solid line). Since there are no available fragility curves for RC structures in Koshimura et al (2009), we calculated the fragility curves manually for RC structures based on the relationship of RC and wood structure fragility curves from Suppasri et al (2013). Table 2 shows the ratio comparison between RC and wood structures for each type of structure and number of stories, and we used the first ratios for RC and wood structures overall (2.48 for R µ , and 1.82 for R σ ) to create the RC fragility curves from the wood fragility curves (dotted lines) in Figure 10.…”

Influence of Flow Velocity on Tsunami Loss Estimation

“…Multiple intensity measures (IM) that describe the extent of tsunami inundation have been proposed, including inundation depth, flow velocity, and momentum flux [3,7,8]. Although inundation depth is the most observable intensity measure in post-tsunami situations and the most common IM in the tsunami risk assessment [9][10][11][12], it cannot be taken as the sole representation of tsunami impact on structures, especially for damage caused by hydrodynamic and debris impact forces that are mainly determined by flow velocity [13,14]. During tsunami events, flow velocity is measurable from particle image velocimetry analysis of videos of survivors [15,16], coastal oceanographic radar tsunami system [17], and satellite altimetry [18].…”

Building Damage Assessment Using Scenario Based Tsunami Numerical Analysis and Fragility Curves

“…The 2010 Chilean tsunami and earthquake resulted in a few hundred causalities; 81,000 structures were destroyed and around 109,000 were severely damaged [3]. The 2011 Great East Japan tsunami caused property damage of around 300 billion US dollars, with more than 400,000 buildings reported to be damaged or destroyed [4]. Robust disaster mitigation techniques are necessary for avoiding property damage and human losses.…”