The Morgan Hill Earthquake of April 24, 1984—Fire-Related Aspects

Abstract

Fire following the April 24, 1984, Morgan Hill earthquake (M 6.2) was a primary cause of damage in the cities of Morgan Hill and San Jose, California. Delays in telephone dial tones, perceived as telephone outages, resulted in delayed reports of structural fires to fire departments. A fire at a shopping center in San Jose was the largest single loss in the earthquake, totaling approximately $1 million. Multiple non-fire specific incidents which fire departments were called upon to respond to, such as gas investigations, structural damage checks, downed power wires and medical aid, placed additional heavy demand on limited resources.

Data-driven probabilistic post-earthquake fire ignition model for a community

“…The building construction type for individual ignition data points is available for part of the dataset that was compiled to develop the ignition model (explained in Section 4.1). Table 6 provides the number of buildings and their construction type that experienced ignition in four historical FFE events based on [19,21,22,23]. Table 6 also shows the total number of buildings for each construction type from the census tracts in Table 3 (statistics are obtained from the inventory in Hazus).…”

A stochastic model for time series prediction of the number of post-earthquake fire ignitions in buildings based on the ignition record for the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake

“…As post-earthquake fires have been of concern abroad as well as in Japan, a number of models have been developed to predict the number of post-earthquake fire ignitions (Anderson et al, 2016; Davidson, 2009; Himoto et al, 2014; Kawasumi, 1961; Khorasani et al, 2017; Li et al, 2001; Mizuno and Horiuchi, 1976; Ren and Xie, 2004; Scawthorn, 1987, 2009; Scawthorn et al, 1998, 2005; Zhao et al, 2006; Zolfaghari et al, 2009). With the exceptions of Mohammadi et al (1994) and Williamson and Groner (2000), which use event tree and fault tree approaches, respectively, almost all of the models are regression models based on the ignition records for past earthquakes to predict the total number of ignitions that occur until several days or several weeks after an earthquake using ground motion parameters, such as peak ground acceleration (PGA) and peak ground velocity (PGV).…”