Impact of Earthquake Types and Aftershocks on Loss Assessment of Non-Code-Conforming Buildings: Case Study with Victoria, British Columbia

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the impact of earthquake types (shallow crustal, deep inslab, and megathrust Cascadia interface earthquakes) and aftershocks on loss assessment of non-code-conforming reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. The loss assessment is formulated within the performance-based earthquake engineering framework. The dependency between the maximum and residual inter-story drift ratios are captured using copulas. Finite-element models that take into account key hysteretic characteristics of non-ductile RC frames were adopted and incremental dynamic analysis is utilized to compute collapse risk. The proposed procedure is applied to a set of 2-, 4-, 8-, and 12-story non-ductile reinforced concrete frames located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. From the results, the aftershock showed marked difference for the 2-story building. At annual probability of 10−2–10−3, crustal and inslab events with Mw6.5 to Mw7.5 contributed the most to the loss as these events occur more frequently. At rarer annual probability of 10−3–10−4, the Cascadia event having Mw8.5 to Mw9.0 is predominant and contributed the most to the loss.