Post-earthquake assessment and management for infrastructure systems: learning from the Canterbury (New Zealand) and L’Aquila (Italy) earthquakes

• Published in: Bulletin of earthquake engineering 2017-02, Vol.15 (2), p.589-620
• Main Authors: Kongar, Indranil, Esposito, Simona, Giovinazzi, Sonia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Assessments; Civil Engineering; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Earthquake engineering; Earthquakes; Emergency preparedness; Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology; Environmental management; Geophysics/Geodesy; Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; Hydrogeology; Infrastructure; Management; Original Research Paper; Resilience; Risk assessment; Seismic activity; Seismic response; Structural Geology; Systems analysis
• ISSN: 1570-761X; 1573-1456
• DOI: 10.1007/s10518-015-9761-y

Both the April 6, 2009 L’Aquila (Italy) earthquake, and the 2010–2011 Canterbury (New Zealand) earthquake sequence provided unprecedented opportunity to enhance the understanding on earthquake performance of infrastructure systems, and to analyse still-opened issues affecting the post-earthquake assessment and management of infrastructure. This paper provides a succinct and holistic overview on the physical and functional performances of the gas, water, waste water, road and electric networks (this one to a limited extent for the L’Aquila case-study), following the moment magnitude (M w ) 6.3 L’Aquila earthquake, and two main events of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, namely: the M w 7.1 September 4, 2010 Darfield and the M w 6.2 February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. A structured format, based on internationally recognised taxonomies and damage descriptors, is introduced to present the assets and to report on the earthquake-induced physical impacts for both above-ground and underground components. Functional impacts, interdependency issues and resilience attributes observed during the emergency management and recovery phases for the same infrastructure systems are furthermore discussed in the paper. It is envisaged that the data and overview on the seismic performance and management of infrastructure systems presented in the paper can be used to test the effectiveness of existing models and to inform the development of new models for seismic risk assessment and resilience analysis. Also, the structured framework presented within this paper can form the basis for defining specific and standardised survey tools for post-earthquake assessment of infrastructure systems.