Disaster preparedness using risk-assessment methods from earthquake engineering

Abstract

Analyzing the uncertainties associated with disaster occurrences is critical to make effective disaster preparedness plans. In this study, we focus on pre-positioning emergency supplies for earthquake preparedness. We present a new method to compute earthquake likelihood and the number of the affected people. Our approach utilizes forecasting methods from the earthquake engineering literature, and avoids using probabilistic scenarios to represent the uncertainties related to earthquake occurrences. We validate the proposed technique by using historical earthquake data from Turkey, a country under significant earthquake risk. We also present a case study that illustrates the implementation of our method to solve the inventory allocation problem of the Turkish Red Crescent