A Rapid Estimation Method for Post-earthquake Building Losses

Rapid estimation of post-earthquake building damage and loss is very important in urgent response efforts. The current approach leaves much room for improvement in estimating ground motion and correctly incorporating the uncertainty and spatial correlation of the loss. This study proposed a new approach for rapidly estimating post-earthquake building loss with reasonable accuracy. The proposed method interpolates ground motion based on the observed ground motion using the Ground Motion Prediction Equation (GMPE) as the weight. It samples the building seismic loss quantile considering the spatial loss correlation that is expressed by Gaussian copula, and kriging is applied to reduce the dimension of direct sampling for estimation speed. The proposed approach was validated using three historical earthquake events in Japan with actual loss reports, and was then applied to predict the building loss amount for the March 2022 Fukushima Mw7.3 earthquake. The proposed method has high potential in future emergency efforts such as search, rescue, and evacuation planning.