Abstract
Sustainability is a vague all-encompassing concept that increasingly influences industrial and social actions and is a controlling element in many major engineering projects. This chapter focuses on the mitigation of threats to sustainability by earthquakes. There are two components to mitigation; providing structures by appropriate resistance to earthquake shaking and minimization of deaths and suffering by cost effective emergency response. Both aspects of mitigation will be illustrated by recent innovative engineering developments in the context of major projects; retrofit of 800 schools within a 15 year period, and the development and application of a real time post-earthquake decision model for dealing with national emergencies. This model is currently being employed to evaluate various threats from a natural disaster to a terrorist act during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The development of the unique retrofit methodology described in this chapter is the result of a highly supportive and collaborative partnership of the following contributors: the British Columbia Ministry of Education; the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (APEGBC); the University of British Columbia; the APEGBC Structural Peer Review Committee (BC engineers); and the APEGBC External Peer Review committee (California engineers). The Canadian members of the project team wish to acknowledge the contribution of their California colleagues. Farzad Naeim, Michael Mehrain and Robert Hanson have provided invaluable guidance to this project in their capacity as members of the External Peer Review Committee. Hugon Juarez Garcia developed the seismic aspects of the I2SIM simulator and the concept of the interaction matrix for taking interdependencies into account.
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Finn, W.L. (2011). Seismic Hazards. In: Iai, S. (eds) Geotechnics and Earthquake Geotechnics Towards Global Sustainability. Geotechnical, Geological, and Earthquake Engineering, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0470-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0470-1_2
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