Improving Situational Awareness During Early Earthquake Response Using Existing Seismic Risk Models to Rapidly Estimate Damage

In the first several hours following an earthquake, municipalities are often forced to rely upon reports from first responders, reconnaissance along disrupted roadways by emergency personnel, or wait for aerial surveillance and remote sensing. The latter is expected to take at least 12 hours, a crucial period following a major earthquake in which situational awareness can be greatly improved using existing seismic risk modelling tools.

This work presents a new initiative to develop a rapid disaster modelling protocol for earthquakes in British Columbia (BC). We explore best practices and the feasibility of using immediately available seismic data in the existing OpenQuake Canada framework to model the impacts to people, the built environment, and the economy from an earthquake in near real-time. The current prototype integrates observed ground motion data from regional strong motion seismometers, like the BC Smart Infrastructure Monitoring System, with physical exposure data from Natural Resources Canada's Human Settlement Layer to report on key metrics for early response: collapsed buildings, entrapment injuries, hospital demand surge, roadway debris which may block response, and immediate mass care needs like shelter requirements. These indicators will be ported to the British Columbia Common Operating Picture Portal, the online situational awareness and mapping platform for authoritative, collaborative and coordinated distribution of emergency management information in the province. These outputs could be made available within tens of minutes of the earthquake occurring, potentially affording emergency managers the opportunity to best direct resources to save lives and reduce suffering.