Elevated collapse risk based on decaying aftershock hazard and damaged building fragilities

This article proposes a framework to support postearthquake building safety and reoccupancy decisions by quantifying the change in building collapse risk following a mainshock earthquake event. This risk may be exacerbated by both an increase in seismic hazard due to aftershock activity and a reduction in building collapse resistance due to structural damage. To address these factors, the framework is based on a hazard that includes (1) both the steady-state and the aftershock occurrence rates, that is, the elevated hazard that accounts for the dependence on the mainshock magnitude and the aftershock rate that decays over time, and (2) revised collapse fragility functions that account for structural damage sustained during the mainshock. The framework is capable of addressing region-specific questions such as (1) What are the mainshock magnitudes for which aftershocks pose a life-safety concern? (2) How long does it take for the elevated risk due to aftershocks to dissipate? and (3) What gaps in current knowledge deserve further attention from the earthquake engineering and seismology communities? The framework addresses these questions for a 20-story building in San Francisco, assuming three different, hypothetical mainshock events of magnitudes 7,7.5, and 8 M W on the San Andreas fault. This is followed by a parametric study that considers a range of buildings and provides a graphical representation of the elevated risk to inform building evaluation (tagging) decisions, based on the intact building’s collapse capacity, the amount of structural damage, and the length of time after the mainshock.