Session Details

Test Driving a Rapid Disaster Modelling Methodology for British Columbia Earthquakes

3 November 2020

Tiegan Hobbs, Natural Resources Canada. Rapid Disaster Modelling

Webinar Format

Interactive Workshop

Presentation & Discussion

Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity, Mitzi Dean - Speaker"

Mitzi Dean was elected as MLA for Esquimalt-Metchosin in 2017, and was appointed the Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity in February 2018. Parliamentary Secretary Dean grew up in southeast England and has spent the last 30 years helping vulnerable people. Before moving to the Victoria area in 2005, Mitzi Dean served as a national development manager for children's services with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the U.K.'s largest child protection charity. Prior to that, she worked in child protection social work and community-based social services across Great Britain for more than 20 years. She also volunteered at a Romanian orphanage and a transition house in the U.K. providing refuge for women experiencing relationship violence. Most recently, she served as executive director of the Pacific Centre Family Services Association. PS Dean lives in Metchosin with her partner and daughter.
Robin Cox, Ph.D. Royal Roads University"

Robin is the Program Head of the graduate programs in Climate Action Leadership at Royal Roads University (RRU) and a Professor in the Disaster and Emergency Management Master of Arts program. As Director of the ResilienceByDesign ILab (RbD) at RRU, Robin leads multiple action research and educational initiatives focused on resilience and enhancing the capacity of youth and adults to address the complex and intersecting challenges of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
Emily Dicken, Ph.D. First Nations Health Authority"

Dr. Emily Dicken has worked as a practitioner in the field of emergency management since 2006, spending the first twelve years of her career with the province of BC working in health emergency management and then for Emergency Management BC where she held the role of Director, First Nation Coordination. Emily is now the Director of Emergency Management at First Nations Health Authority. Beyond her work at FNHA, Emily pursues academic interests with a central focus on understanding colonialism as an unnatural and enduring disaster impacting Indigenous communities. When not working, Emily can be found enjoying time in the outdoors with her husband Jeff and their two young sons, Keegan and Bowen.
Jackie Yip, Ph.D. Natural Resources Canada"

Jackie Yip is a Research Scientist within the Public Safety Geoscience Program at Natural Resources Canada, where she is leading research efforts in developing best practices and new methods for understanding flood risk and community resilience and recovery. Her research interest lies at the intersect of climate adaptation, disaster risk modelling, and decision-making, and specializes in predictive modelling and data-visualization.
Laurie Johnson, Ph.D. Laurie Johnson Consulting I Research"

Laurie is an internationally-recognized urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management, and based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For over 30 years, she has combined her unique blend of professional practice and research to help communities address the complex urban challenges posed by natural hazards and disasters. Much of her post-disaster recovery efforts are captured in her recent book, After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (2017). She is President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and on the Board of Directors of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative and the Advisory Board of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM). She was also inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP) in 2018. She holds a Doctorate in Informatics from Kyoto University, Japan, as well as a Master of Urban Planning and Bachelors of Science in Geophysics, both from Texas A&M University.
Sahar Safaie (Moderator). Sage On Earth Consulting

Sahar Safaie is the founder and principal consultant of Sage on Earth Consulting Ltd., based in North Vancouver. The niche of her expertise and services is to enhance the use of disaster and climate risk information in designing resilience policies, investments and programs. She has more than fifteen years of diverse experiences in BC and internationally including at United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), Global Earthquake Model, the World Bank, and Risk Management Solutions. Sahar has lead development of two of the Sendai Framework implementation guidelines on National Disaster Risk Assessment and National Disaster Risk Reduction Strategies.

Objectives

Introduce the project as well as current roadblocks and provide an open-format opportunity for community feedback.
Identify existing tools that can be used in this initiative (e.g. can BCSIMS shakemaps be exported to OpenQuake?) and other groups that might benefit from being brought in as project partners.
Identify the types of output that would be needed to make this tool useful for practitioners. (ex: Maps of expected casualties posted on GeoBC’s Common Operating Picture? Or would a simple PAGER-style output on the NRCan website suffice?)
Demonstrate the tool by test-driving scenarios, as time permits.
Explore best practice and the feasibility of using rapidly available seismic data in the existing OpenQuake Canada framework to report on key metrics for early response: collapsed buildings, entrapment injuries, hospital demand surge.

Description

This work presents a new initiative to develop a rapid disaster modelling protocol for earthquakes in British Columbia (BC). We will explore best practice and the feasibility of using rapidly available seismic data in the existing OpenQuake Canada framework to model the impacts to people, the built environment, and the economy. The current prototype will integrate observed ground motion data from the BC Smart Infrastructure Monitoring System with physical exposure data from Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) Human Settlement Layer to report on key metrics for early response: collapsed buildings, entrapment injuries, hospital demand surge, roadway debris which may block response, and immediate mass care needs like shelter requirements. These indicators will be ported to the GeoBC Common Operating Picture, the online portal for authoritative and coordinated distribution of emergency management information in the province. These outputs could likely be made available within tens of minutes of the earthquake occurring.

Without this tool, municipalities would have to rely on reports from first responders, reconnaissance along disrupted roadways by emergency personnel, or aerial surveillance performed by the military. The latter is expected to take at least 12 hours, a crucial period following a major earthquake in which situational awareness can be vastly improved by our tool. We hope to get feedback from emergency managers, first responders, and any other regional stakeholders about how this prototype performs and what changes they would like to make to it.

Contributors

Convened Tiegan Hobbs and Gurdeep Singh, with Murray Journeay