HR: 0800h
AN: S21A-0260    [Abstracts]
TI: A Method for Estimation of Death Tolls in Disastrous Earthquake
AU: * Pai, C
EM: s0342014@cc.ncu.edu.tw
AF: Department of Civil Engineering, National Central University, No 300, Jhongda Road, Jhongli, 320 Taiwan
AU: * Pai, C
EM: s0342014@cc.ncu.edu.tw
AF: Department of Civil Engineering, Nanya Institute of Technology, No 414, Sec.3, Chung-Shang East Road, Jhongli, 320 Taiwan
AU: Tien, Y
EM: ymt@cc.ncu.edu.tw
AF: Department of Civil Engineering, National Central University, No 300, Jhongda Road, Jhongli, 320 Taiwan
AU: Teng, T
EM: lteng@usc.edu
AF: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, 3651 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089 United States
AB: Fatality tolls caused by the disastrous earthquake are the one of the most important items among the earthquake damage and losses. If we can precisely estimate the potential tolls and distribution of fatality in individual districts as soon as the earthquake occurrences, it not only make emergency programs and disaster management more effective but also supply critical information to plan and manage the disaster and the allotments of disaster rescue manpower and medicine resources in a timely manner. In this study, we intend to reach the estimation of death tolls caused by the Chi-Chi earthquake in individual districts based on the Attributive Database of Victims, population data, digital maps and Geographic Information Systems. In general, there were involved many factors including the characteristics of ground motions, geological conditions, types and usage habits of buildings, distribution of population and social-economic situations etc., all are related to the damage and losses induced by the disastrous earthquake. The density of seismic stations in Taiwan is the greatest in the world at present. In the meantime, it is easy to get complete seismic data by earthquake rapid-reporting systems from the Central Weather Bureau: mostly within about a minute or less after the earthquake happened. Therefore, it becomes possible to estimate death tolls caused by the earthquake in Taiwan based on the preliminary information. Firstly, we form the arithmetic mean of the three components of the Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) to give the PGA Index for each individual seismic station, according to the mainshock data of the Chi-Chi earthquake. To supply the distribution of Iso-seismic Intensity Contours in any districts and resolve the problems for which there are no seismic station within partial districts through the PGA Index and geographical coordinates in individual seismic station, the Kriging Interpolation Method and the GIS software, The population density depends on whether the districts are more urbanized or not. As the present researches are concerned, there were not a good and reliable relationship between the mortality and the characteristics of ground motions. We propose the concept of Equal Population Gaps to resolve the influence of mortality in a rural or urban district and decision of the weighting function to each district. The relationship between PGA Index and the mortality determined in this study can be expressed as:\[{\it M}=28.9/[1+exp{(1.67-0.0029 \times {\it PGA})}] \] Here {\it M} is mortality in %, and {\it PGA} is PGA Index in gals. The corresponding curve matches the data reasonably well, with R$^{2}$=0.91. We process the estimation for districts in different scales to verify the feasibility of the method. The mortality-based on PGA Index is particularly useful in real-time application for death tolls prediction and assessment--a piece of information most critical for post earthquake emergency response operation.
DE: 7223 Seismic hazard assessment and prediction
DE: 6699 General or miscellaneous
DE: 7212 Earthquake ground motions and engineering
DE: 0902 Computational methods, seismic
DE: 0935 Seismic methods (3025)
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting