The Kalgoorlie Earthquake, 20 April, 2010, Vulnerability of Unreinforced Masonry Buildings  

Authors / CoAuthors

Edwards, M. | Corby, N. | Wehner, M.

Abstract

An understanding of the vulnerability of the built environment to ground shaking is vital to the impact and risk assessment process. The vulnerability of Unreinforced Masonry (URM) buildings to earthquake hazard as been repeatedly demonstrated around the world. A portion of Australia's building stock is made up of legacy URM buildings dating from before the First World War. These buildings are typical of inner-city suburbs and the centres of country towns. The Kalgoorlie Earthquake of 20 April, 2010 offered the best opportunity to study the vulnerability of Australian URM buildings to ground shaking since the Newcastle Earthquake in 1989. The Kalgoorlie earthquake caused shaking of MMI intensity VI in Boulder and intensity V in Kalgoorlie. Damage was principally confined to turn-of-the-century URM buildings with only slight damage observed in more modern cavity masonry domestic residential buildings. Geoscience Australia led a post-event field survey to record damage to buildings in Boulder - Kalgoorlie. The survey recorded street-view imagery of the entire urban area and subsequently a detailed survey template was complete during a door-to-door foot survey. The foot survey targeted the entire population of turn-of-the-century buildings in Boulder-Kalgoorlie together with a sample of modern cavity masonry domestic residential buildings. The aim of the foot survey was to capture sufficient information to enable the calculation of a damage index (or loss ratio) for each surveyed building. The survey and subsequent analysis revealed an average damage index for turn-of-the-century URM buildings of 0.062 in Boulder (MMI VI) and 0.019 in Kalgoorlie (MMI V). These values are slightly higher than those reported post-Newcastle for ? . Difficulties encountered with computing damage indices for individual buildings are enumerated and recommendations are presented to improve future post-earthquake population surveys.

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nonGeographicDataset

eCat Id

75913

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Keywords

• GA Publication

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

• Natural Hazards

• Published_Internal

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2013-01-01T00:00:00

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Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem    

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

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asNeeded

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structure

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Report on field survey of earthquake damage

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Results of post-earthquake field survey of building damage: Boulder - Kalgoorlie, WA Results of post-earthquake field survye of building damage: Boulder-Kalgoorlie, WA