Strengthening natural hazard risk assessment capacity in the Philippines:  an earthquake impact pilot study for Iloilo City, Western Visayas

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) and Geoscience Australia (GA) have developed a long-term partnership in order to better understand and reduce the risks associated with earthquake hazards in the Philippines.  The Project discussed herein was supported by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID).  Specifically, this partnership was designed to enhance the exposure and damage estimation capabilities of the Rapid Earthquake Damage Assessment System (REDAS), which has been designed and built by PHIVOLCS.  Prior to the commencement of this Project, REDAS had the capability to model a range of potential earthquake hazards including ground shaking, tsunami inundation, liquefaction and landslides, as well as providing information about elements at risk (e.g., schools, bridges, etc.) from the aforementioned hazards.  The current Project enhances the exposure and vulnerability modules in REDAS and enable it to estimate building damage and fatalities resulting from scenario earthquakes, and to provide critical information to first-responders on the likely impacts of an earthquake in near real-time.  To investigate this emergent capability within PHIVOLCS, we have chosen the pilot community of Iloilo City, Western Visayas.
A large component of this project has been the compilation of datasets to develop building exposure models, and subsequently, developing methodologies to make these datasets useful for natural hazard impact assessments.  Collection of the exposure data was undertaken at two levels: national and local.  The national exposure dataset was gathered from the Philippines National Statistics Office (NSO) and comprises basic information on wall type, roof type, and floor area for residential buildings.  The NSO census dataset also comprises crucial information on the population distribution throughout the Philippines.  The local exposure dataset gathered from the Iloilo City Assessors Office includes slightly more detailed information on the building type for all buildings (residential, commercial, government, etc.) and appears to provide more accurate information on the floor area.  However, the local Iloilo City dataset does not provide any information on the number of people that occupy these buildings.  Consequently, in order for the local data to be useful for our purposes, we must merge the population data from the NSO with the local Assessors Office data.  Subsequent validation if the Iloilo City exposure database has been conducted through targeted foot-based building inventory surveys and has allowed us to generate statistical models to approximate the distribution of engineering structural systems aggregated at a barangay level using simple wall and roof-type information from the NSO census data.
We present a comparison of the national and local exposure data and discuss how information assembled from the Iloilo City pilot study - and future study areas where detailed exposure assessments are conducted - could be extended to describe the distribution of building stock in other regions of the Philippines using only the first-order national-scale NSO data.  We present exposure information gathered for Iloilo City at barangay level in a format that can be readily imported to REDAS for estimating earthquake impact.

Tags: Earth Sciences, GA Publication, Hazard Response, Natural Hazards, Pacific Nations, Philippines, Published_External, Record, earthquakes, hazards, risk analysis, risk assessment
Organization: Geoscience Australia Data