Evaluating a city’s vulnerability to fire following earthquake

Recent extreme events such as major earthquakes have emphasized the need for disaster-resilient communities. In a resilience framework, the built environment is designed to respond adequately to low probability-high consequence events. The latter include cascading multi-hazard events such as fires following an earthquake, which can cause major social and economic losses in a community as observed for instance in the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge events in the United States.
This presentation provides a methodology to evaluate the response of buildings in a community subject to fire following earthquake. First, a model is developed to determine the probability of ignition in buildings of a community due to an earthquake. Second, fragility functions are developed for buildings subject to fire, to quantify the structural damage and the expected losses. In the future, the ignition model, combined with the fragility functions, can be implemented in a GIS based risk management platform to evaluate economical losses in a region from fire following an earthquake.