Cracking an Open Safe: Uncertainty in HAZUS-Based Seismic Vulnerability Functions

The “cracking an open safe” methodology has been used to tabulate HAZUS-based seismic vulnerability as functions of structure-independent intensity, while avoiding iteration in the structural analysis. The vulnerability functions give mean damage factor (MDF, defined here as mean repair cost as a fraction of replacement cost) versus 5%-damped elastic spectral acceleration response at 0.3-second and 1.0-second periods, for every combination of occupancy type, model building type, design level, magnitude, distance, site soil classification, etc. Like HAZUS-MH, these prior seismic vulnerability functions give no estimate of uncertainty in damage factor. The coefficient of variation (COV) of damage factor is readily calculated by taking advantage of the fact that that at any level of excitation there is a probability mass function of damage state and an implicit distribution of repair cost conditioned on damage state. COV is calculated here for each combination of occupancy type, model building type, etc., tabulated alongside MDF, and the tables presented for public use at www.riskagora.org. It is found that a HAZUS-based COV generally decreases with increasing MDF (as has been observed using other analytical vulnerability methods), and the standard deviation of damage factor generally increases with increasing MDF. DOI: 10.1193/1.3459153