| Strong networks of professionals
and researchers who focus on earthquakes and other public safety issues
are in place to facilitate sharing information, techniques, and tools to
plan for and respond to events that impact large groups of the population.
One of the biggest contributions to these networks is the MAEviz open source
software program, developed by the Mid-America Earthquake (MAE) Center,
an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. The MAEviz online platform continues to seamlessly
integrate cutting-edge science and technology to provide geographically
distributed researchers, engineers, scientists, social scientists, and
decision makers with a new generation of impact assessment software.
MAEviz supports approximately
forty different analyses for buildings, bridges, hazards, lifelines, and
socioeconomic models. MAEviz has made significant strides in
improving usability and providing an intuitive interface for its many analyses.
All steps in its development were guided by User Needs Workshops run by
the Center, to which various potential users groups were invited to try
out the software and fill out questionnaires on its features and interfaces.
In 2008, engineers, social scientists, and economists added a set of new
capabilities to MAEviz to predict social vulnerability, fiscal impact,
household and population dislocation, shelter requirements, short-term
shelter needs, business content loss, business interruption and inventory
loss. These features were tested on 17 April 2008, when a medium magnitude
earthquake hit the Central U.S. near the Illinois-Indiana border. Within
minutes, the MAEviz team issued impact estimates that were proven reasonably
representative of observations. MAEviz is currently used on a major FEMA-funded
project to predict earthquake impacts on the Central US and on Memphis
and St. Louis, as the two cities that are likely to be most affected.
The online software platform
can compute the expected household and population dislocation by combining
information from the social vulnerability and structural damage analyses.
The expected dislocation can then be used to determine shelter needs and
requirements such as food, water, cots, and blankets. Local and regional
planners can also feed the residential damage into the fiscal impact analysis
to determine the anticipated property tax loss of a region based on decreased
value of the structure (see figure for an example property tax loss by
block group in Shelby County, Tennessee). These unprecedented capabilities
provide local and regional planners with the tools necessary for effective
seismic hazard planning and mitigation, and once again place the MAE Center
at the core of earthquake response planning throughout the country. |
