Humanitarian relief is a key operation after a disaster for people who are isolated in disaster-affected areas and cannot get basic supplies for daily living. Because the demand can be large and unexpected, an efficient humanitarian relief logistics planning becomes extremely important. In a recent paper, Lin et al. (2009) proposed a logistics model for disaster relief operations. In this paper...

This paper examines the spatial variability in the social vulnerability of residents to potential levee failures in the Sacramento Delta region. To determine the likely flood exposure, levees of concern to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and California’s Department of Water Resources were mapped. The HAZUS-MH loss estimation software and 100-year protection standard were used to hypothetically...

Spurred in part by the rising economic costs of natural disasters, there has been a dramatic increase in efforts aimed at estimating the direct and indirect losses caused by earthquakes. For example, in 1997 the journal Earthquake Spectra devoted a special issue to loss estimation. Papers appearing in that publication ranged from cost-benefit analyses of structural rehabilitation strategies (D’...

Abstract A major cause of local to total damages is related structural pounding in a large number past earthquakes. In general, these collisions take place as result differences the dynamic characteristics colliding structures. To acquire better perception behavior structures, this paper, three structures featuring different heights are modeled series and with various configurations next each o...

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the City of New York, United States, are particularly vulnerable to frequent extreme weather events, including storm surges, high-intensity rainfall, and sea level rise, also affected by cascade these events. The complex structural configuration WWTPs requires very fine-scale flood risk assessment, which current research has not pursued. We propose a robus...

Owners of building portfolios in earthquake country have several data-related seismic risk mitigation concerns: Before an earthquake, they need to know the locations and seismic characteristics of their buildings to know which might pose a potential seismic risk. They also need the ability to assess and prioritize riskmitigation efforts, and to develop emergency response plans. Immediately afte...

Rapid evaluation of demand parameters of different types of  buildings is crucial for social restoration after damaging earthquakes. Previous studies proposed numerous methodologies to measure the performance of buildings for assessing the potential risk under the seismic hazard. However, time-consuming Nonlinear Response History Analysis (NRHA) barricaded implementing a prompt loss estimation ...

In order to promote researches in seismic hazard analysis, engineering structural damage assessment, and socio-economic loss estimation in Taiwan, the National Science Council started the HAZ-Taiwan project in 1998. The National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering also develops the associated application software "Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System" to integrate various inventor...