ShakeCast abstract submitted to the 2017 SSA Meeting Session on Earthquake Impacts on the Natural and Built Environment and Hazard Forecasts

Expansion of the USGS ShakeCast System for Rapid Post-Earthquake Assessments of Critical Facilities

K. Lin, D. J. Wald, C.A. Kircher, K. Jaiswal, N. Luco, L. Turner, D. Slosky

ShakeCast is employed by public and private emergency responders, lifeline operators, and facility engineers to automatically receive and process ShakeMap products for situational awareness, inspection priority, or damage assessment. As part of ongoing ShakeCast research and development and an extensive rewrite of the ShakeCast application, we have enhanced functionality, updated the code base (from Perl to Python), and improved the user interface. The engineering-based approaches for determining damage state (or inspection priorities) have been improved, implementing the interactive HAZUS capacity spectrum method and HAZUS Advanced Engineering Building Module (AEBM). An enhanced ShakeCast Workbook (an Excel spreadsheet) exports users’ data into ShakeCast and allows for more intuitive management of facilities, fragilities, users, and notifications, as well as ShakeCast configurations. Users can select structure fragilities based on a minimum set of user-specified facility features (building location, size, height, use, construction age, etc.) and “expert” users can import user-modified structural response properties into facility inventory associated with the HAZUS Advanced Engineering Building Modules (AEBM). In addition to accessing real-time ShakeMaps, ShakeCast now accesses a new collection of scenario and atlas ShakeMaps via the USGS real-time earthquake information GeoJSON feeds for both pre-event planning and loss calibration. Lastly, we describe further expansion of the ShakeCast user base, notably for state Departments of Transportation (DoTs) facilitated by a USDOT Transportation Pooled Fund, connecting the DoTs in 10 states. Though ShakeCast is supported by the USGS, important financial and technical contributions come from critical users including the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Contacts: Kuo-wan Lin (Klin@usgs.gov); David Wald (wald@usgs.gov)