Civil Engineering Reference
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are also used for estimating insured losses and economic impacts; however,
much of the data and models within these platforms are not made publicly
available.
Country- or region-specifi c rapid loss estimation tools have also been
developed in the past. Early efforts in this arena include the EPEDAT
(Early Post-Earthquake Damage Assessment Tool) system that was devel-
oped around the time of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California,
United States (Eguchi
et al.
, 1997). Similar to EPEDAT, the Italian SIGE
system, which is the Emergency Management Information System that was
developed by the Department of Civil Protection in the mid-1990s, provides
a range of capabilities including scenario earthquake loss analysis and post-
earthquake damage/loss estimation using INGV's near-real time earth-
quake parameters (Di Pasquale
et al.
, 2004).
In the United States, the National Institute of Building Sciences and
Federal Emergency Management Agency's Hazus software (http://www.
fema.gov/plan/prevent/hazus/) contains comprehensive datasets and models
for estimating potential losses from earthquakes, fl oods, and hurricanes. It
uses geographic information systems (GIS) technology to facilitate the
estimation of physical, economic, and social impacts of disasters. Hazus is
used for mitigation and recovery as well as preparedness and response.
Following the Hazus development in the United States, many countries
such as Taiwan, Australia, Israel, and Canada have developed their own
country-specifi c 'Hazus-like' applications by using and or modifying Hazus
methodologies for their domestic applications. These tools now provide an
important step forward in identifying, understanding and mitigating poten-
tial disaster losses in several other parts of the world.
Stafford
et al.
(2007) further details methodological aspects of seismic
hazard, vulnerability, and loss estimation approaches developed over the
last decade. Similarly, Erdik
et al.
(2011) provide a brief assessment of the
technical and functional capabilities of some of the systems discussed above
and summarize the key advances in the evolution of rapid earthquake loss
estimation systems over the past decade.
A wide variety of modeling strategies, lack of transparency or open avail-
ability of data, models, and tools, their regional nature, and the limited
reporting of results make systematic comparison of these various applica-
tions diffi cult. Indeed they often serve different purposes and stakeholders.
Most systems are applicable for specifi c earthquakes or regions. For example,
commercial models serve specifi c clients, but in general they are opaque
('blackbox') and reporting is normally limited to specifi c economic impacts,
normally insured, and typically these numbers are only provided days after
a very signifi cant event. Additionally, alerts or loss estimates produced from
many of these systems are not publicly available: for ELER, SIGE, and
Hazus, aggregated results are only made available to or via the respective
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