Integrating Hazard, Engineering and Economic Models to Evaluate Earthquake Mitigation Strategies: Applying the IN-CORE model to Salt Lake City, Utah

Abstract

This paper focuses on integrating stochastic engineering with economic models to evaluate earthquake mitigation policies in Salt Lake County, UT, by comparing results under a portfolio of ex-ante and ex-post policies that can potentially reduce some adverse impacts during and after a seismic event. Drawing on the county assessorﾒs data and data recently published by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the analysis is founded at the parcel level to understand how a simulated earthquake affects commercial and residential building functionality by developing an engineering model that quantifies the physical impacts of scenario earthquakes including the functionality of individual building structures within the community. Then, a spatial computable general equilibrium (SCGE) model is constructed to aggregate commercial buildings into sectors for retail, manufacturing, services, etc., and aggregates residential buildings into a wide range of household groups. The spatial component of the SCGE model is introduced by specifying the location of each building structure. The SCGE model employs the functionality estimates from engineering analysis to estimate the economic losses. The physical and economic impact estimates for each scenario earthquake are considered baseline scenarios to evaluate various potential mitigation policies in terms of their ability to minimize the baseline physical and economic losses. Although this paper focuses on reducing physical and economic losses, the modeling framework can consider other objectives, including reduced population disruption and maintaining the functionality of critical public institutions. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using the case study of Salt Lake City, Utah.