GIS-Based Rapid Disaster Loss Assessment for Earthquakes

Soon after an earthquake, the government should conduct a rapid assessment to determine the spatial distributions of the damages, including casualties, collapsed houses, infrastructures, and secondary disasters. The government can then allocate rescue teams and distribute rescue resources according to these factors. This paper introduces the process of rapid earthquake disaster assessment and describes the ioseismal attenuation model, damaged buildings model, economic losses model, and fatalities model. All the disaster loss assessment models are integrated into a geographic information system (GIS). Four earthquakes, for which adequate published records are available, are selected to examine the performance of the GIS-based rapid assessment in helping the government to perform emergency rescue work. The calculated results of the four selected earthquakes indicate that the intensities of the meizoseismal area and the affected area have the acceptable mean accuracies between 97.5% and 76.5%. The mean accuracies of the number of fatalities and direct economic losses are 66.1% and 54.2%, respectively, whereas the affected population, the number of damaged houses, and the number of injured people have relatively lower mean accuracies. Although the assessment results are not absolutely accurate, the spatial distribution of the results corresponds with the actual situation.