Published works

The seismic risk posed by earthquakes to buildings in our major cities in Australia is significant with the world insurance market rating a modest magnitude 6 earthquake occurring in Sydney to be in their world’s top 10 of financial risks.  A major reason for this is that Australia had not designed buildings for earthquake-induced forces until 1995, so a large portion of our building stock is seismically vulnerable.  As demonstrated in Christchurch New Zealand in 2010-11, a magnitude 6 earthquake can have a devastating impact on a city and country (damage rebuild estimated at ~ 20% national GDP) even though buildings there have been designed for earthquakes for many decades.

This project will investigate:

1)    The relative vulnerabilities to earthquake shaking of the most common forms of building construction in Australia;

2)    What earthquake retrofit techniques worked and what didn’t work in Christchurch as a starting point to developing a ‘menu’ of economically feasible seismic retrofit techniques that could be used in Australian cities; and

3)    With industry end-user support, conduct proof of concept tests on some of the most promising seismic retrofit techniques on buildings scheduled for demolition by the South Australian state government;

4)    Use the new damage and economic loss models developed over the first 3 years of this project to undertake a seismic risk assessment case study of the Melbourne metro area.  In conjunction with the new damage loss models and costings for seismically retrofitting buildings, make recommendations for the development of seismic retrofit guidelines and policy based on the strong evidence base developed.

5)    Advance a series of end user focused research utilisation projects in the areas of improved building regulation, community risk reduction, design profession guidance and insurance industry engagement with their policy holders.

This information will then be fed into a ‘decision support tool’ being developed in the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project “Decision support system for assessment of policy and planning investment options for optimal natural hazard mitigation” that will be used by end users to develop consistent national policies for the application of seismic design of new buildings and retrofit of existing buildings.