Development and Application of the CanRisk Injury Model and a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to Evaluate Seismic Risk in the Context of Emergency Management in Canada: Case Study of Ottawa, Canada

Abstract

Approximately 43% of Canada’s population reside in urban centres at most seismic risk.This research creates practical and proactive tools to support decision making in emergency management regarding earthquake risk. This proactive approach evaluates the potential impact of future earthquakes for informed mitigation and preparedness decisions. The overall aims are to evaluate a community’s operational readiness, reveal limitations and resources gaps in the emergency plan, test potential mitigation and preparedness strategies and provide a realistic earthquake scenario for training activities. Two models, the CanRisk injury model and a disaster Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS), were designed and developed to further evaluate seismic risk on a community scale. The injury model is an extension of the engineering-based CanRisk tool and quantifies an individual’s risk to injury, the number of injuries, and provides an injury profile of life-threatening injuries at the building scale. The model implements fuzzy synthetic evaluation to quantify seismic risk, mathematical calculations to estimate number of injuries, and a decision-matrix to generate the injury profile. The SDSS is an evidence-based model that is designed for the planning phase to evaluate post-earthquake emergency response. Loss estimations from Hazus Canada and the CanRisk injury model are combined with community geospatial data to simulate post-earthquake conditions that are important for immediate post-earthquake response. Fire services, search and rescue operations (including urban search and rescue and police services), emergency medical services, and relief operations are all modelled. A case study was applied to 27 neighbourhoods in Ottawa, Canada, using a M6.0 and M7.25 scenarios. The models revealed challenges to all emergency response units. A critical threshold exists between the M6.0 and M7.25 scenarios whereby emergency response moves from partial but manageable functionality to a complete system breakdown. The models developed in this research show great utility to emergency managers in Canada.