All posts by Jackson chen

Abstract

Throughout human history, earthquake has generally been regarded as one of the most deadly natural disasters. Although Vancouver is ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world, it is situated on the edge of the “Pacific Ring of Fire”. There are some predictions that in the foreseeable future, Vancouver will be under threat of a big earthquake. Although any earthquakes that take place nearby can easily affect the entire lower mainland, the impact of an earthquake would be homogeneous across the city. Our project attempts to determine the areas with high risk by combining the key hazard factors (incl. landslide, liquefaction, and tsunami hazard) and the vulnerability factors (incl. population density, land-use, hospital accessibility, and pipeline threat). We conducted a comprehensive Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) by using the spatial analysis tools in ArcGIS, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) tool to assign weights for each of the factors. Our final output map suggests that the Southern coast along Fraser River and Arbutus Ridge are most under earthquake threat. In the end, we also provided some loss reduction advice. This study may provide some insights for the earthquake impacts in Vancouver city.