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tion exposure that is subjected to high levels of shaking and hence the
most likely areas of concentrated damage and loss. The exposure maps
currently produced by the operational PAGER system are unable to
provide functionality such as zooming in and out or distinguishing areas
of high exposure, infrastructure or zones of importance given the spatial
distribution of shaking, which are critical in near real-time response
environments.
By rendering ShakeMap and the LandScan population database in a
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format, it is now possible to depict the
relative population impacted by different levels of shaking in applications
like Google Earth (Jaiswal
et al.
, 2011).
Plate VIII
(between pages 452 and
453) shows a snapshot of a Google Earth window showing a 3D color-coded
bar chart for the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The bar height indicates the affected
population and the color indicates the ShakeMap estimated shaking inten-
sity shown using the standard ShakeMap color palette. To avoid a user's
misinterpretation of vertical bars as buildings, an appropriate legend is
provided to explain the distinction. Aggregate estimates of total population
at integer intensity levels (V, VI, VII, etc.) are also produced for the extent
of the ShakeMap as shown separately in the panel at the upper left of the
map shown in Plate VIII (between pages 452 and 453).
31.7.2 Building stock inventory characterization
To characterize the most vulnerable country-specifi c building stock in any
given earthquake, we are working in collaboration with the Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute's (EERI)'s WHE team, to develop a coun-
try-specifi c library of building types, taking existing information from
WHE's housing prototype and also extending the coverage further by
adding more countries. This library serves multiple purposes but its primary
benefi ts are to: (1) list the building types that are prevalent in a given
country, (2) describe certain key aspects of these structure types in terms
of their construction or vulnerability to past earthquakes, (3) identify the
types that potentially dominate the risk of major losses in a given country,
e.g., to help create awareness for long term mitigation, and (4) identify
structure types that could pose challenges during post-earthquake rescue
and response.
Delivery of content from the library for pre-earthquake mitigation, plan-
ning, and education will take the form of country-specifi c building descrip-
tions and photos, both contributed by USGS/PAGER and EERI/WHE (Fig.
31.5). The library not only helps document the general features of construc-
tion practices in different countries but also communicates overall risk; i.e.,
a combination of structural vulnerability/fragility and occupancy. Prototype
webpages have been created for 42 countries via the USGS PAGER and
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