ELER Software - a New Tool for Urban Earthquake Loss Assessment

Rapid loss estimation after potentially damaging earthquakes is critical for effective emergency response and public information. A methodology and software package, Earthquake Loss Estimation Routine-ELER, for rapid estimation of earthquake shaking and losses throughout the Euro-Mediterranean region (Erdik et al., 2008a and 2010a, Hancilar et al., 2009, Sesetyan et al., 2009) was developed under the Joint Research Activity-3 (JRA3) of the EC FP6 Project entitled ¿Network of Research Infrastructures for European Seismology- NERIES (www.neries-eu.org)¿. Recently, a new version (v2.0) of ELER software has been released. The multi-level methodology developed is capable of incorporating regional variability and uncertainty stemming from ground motion predictions, fault finiteness, site modifications, inventory of physical and social elements subjected to earthquake hazard and the associated vulnerability relationships. Although primarily intended for quasi real-time estimation of earthquake shaking and losses, the routine is also equally capable of incorporating scenario based earthquake loss assessments. This paper introduces the urban earthquake loss assessment module (Level 2) of ELER software. Spectral capacity based loss assessment methodology and its vital ingredients are presented. Analysis methods of Level 2 module are applied to the selected building types for validation and verification purposes. The damage estimates are compared to the results obtained from the other studies available in the literature, i.e. SELENA v4.0 (Molina et al., 2008) and ATC-55 (Yang, 2005). A loss assessment exercise for a scenario earthquake for the city of Istanbul is conducted and physical and social losses are presented. Damage to the urban environment is compared to the results obtained from similar software, i.e. KOERILoss (KOERI, 2002) and DBELA (Crowley et al., 2004).

HANCILAR Ufuk;  TUZUN Cuneyt;  YENIDOGAN Cem;  ERDIK Mustafa; 

2011-01-05

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH

JRC59821

1561-8633,   

www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/10/2677/2010/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC59821,   

10.5194/nhess-10-2677-2010,