<p>Rare Australian earthquake events can cause extensive damage and present significant logistical challenges for emergency management agencies and local governments. Evidence of this can be seen from recent earthquake events that include the 2010 Kalgoorlie earthquake and the 1989 Newcastle earthquake of 30 years ago. Emergency managers do not experience damaging earthquakes on the same regular basis as storms, floods, and bushfires and therefore don’t always fully understand the consequences they may face. Scenario modelling can provide insights to inform response and recovery by emergency management and recovery agencies as well as demonstrate how these impacts can be moderated by the retrofit of the most vulnerable building types. <p>The Shire of York is partnering with the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), the University of Adelaide and Geoscience Australia in a collaborative project that explores the current earthquake risk in the heritage town of York, Western Australia, and how the risk could be moderated through targeted retrofit. The project forms part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre project “Cost-effective Mitigation Strategy Development for Building Related Earthquake Risk”. This paper describes the approach taken and the predicted consequences modelled for a range of credible earthquake scenarios. Significantly, based on the recommendations from a stakeholder workshop in York on the 9th August 2018, it is also assessing how these consequences would be moderated in future decades through two rates of retrofit uptake in the town. This work is informing emergency management planning by DFES and the Shire of York. It is also illustrating the benefits of targeted community level retrofit to address the risk posed by the community building types most vulnerable to earthquakes.

<p>The Shire of York is partnering with the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), the University of Adelaide and Geoscience Australia in a collaborative project that will examine the opportunities for reducing the vulnerability of the township of York to a major earthquake. The project forms part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Collaborative Research Centre project “Cost-effective Mitigation Strategy Development for Building related Earthquake Risk”. The township of York has a number of valuable historical buildings that contribute greatly to the town’s economic prosperity and, at the same time, are vulnerable to earthquakes. <p>One of the benefits of retrofitting old buildings is the reduction in physical building repair required following a damaging earthquake. To evaluate this benefit it is necessary to know the vulnerability of the unmitigated building and how this changes following retrofit. This paper describes the approach taken to quantitatively estimate the vulnerability of unmitigated and retrofitted pre-WW1 URM buildings typical of the buildings found in York. Challenges in estimating vulnerability are discussed. Vulnerability curves are presented for one of six generic building types subjected to a range of retrofit scenarios and the economic benefit of each retrofit scenario is discussed.

Earthquakes occur without warning and human mobility during strong shaking is difficult. This has implications for casualty outcomes from such rapid onset events. Unreinforced masonry (URM) in particular presents a great risk in the high pedestrian exposure precincts of major cities. Surveys of major Australian cities have indicated that almost half of the central business district (CBD) buildings by number are of older URM construction and have elements that could fall onto pedestrians in a major shake. With a focus on the greater CBD of Melbourne, this risk and mitigation options for it have been studied. In a case study undertaken as part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC (BNHCRC), the casualties, damage and broader economic consequences of a major earthquake in central Melbourne have been modelled. This research directly utilised BNHCRC vulnerability research on URM by the authors and separate work by Geoscience Australia on modelling human exposure in a major business precinct. Through a virtual retrofit of the high risk URM buildings the benefits of retrofit were demonstrated. In particular, the prioritising of areas of high human exposure in a manner similar to that being used in New Zealand was found to achieve greater reductions of injuries. Abstract submitted to / presented at the 2022 Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (https://aees.org.au/aees-conference-2022/)