Remote sensing technology is effective to grasp the damage distributions from various natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. After the 2007 Niigata-ken Chuetsu-oki, Japan earthquake, aerial images were taken in the stricken area by several air survey companies in Japan. Airborne remote sensing is more suitable to collect detailed damage distribution because it ...

Background: Iran is an earthquake-prone country, and a considerable rural population lives in earthquake-prone areas. With many worn-out areas, incompetent houses, and relatively underdeveloped rural areas, it is necessary to pay special attention to risk reduction and subsequent measures in these areas. Materials and Methods: Among the current methods, HAZUS is one of the most common methods ...

The capabilities and advantages of laser scanners used for structural engineering applications to monitor and assess structural damage in laboratory tests and post-earthquake field survey are discussed. High definition laser scans have many advantages over conventional instrumentation as follows: (1) they capture three dimensional global deformations of large objects with accuracy, (2) they all...

The most costly American earthquake since 1906 struck Los Angeles on 17 January 1994. The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake resulted from more than 3 meters of reverse slip on a 15-kilometer-long south-dipping thrust fault that raised the Santa Susana mountains by as much as 70 centimeters. The fault appears to be truncated by the fault that broke in the 1971 San Fernando earthquake at a dept...

When an earthquake occurs, seismologists want to use recorded seismograms to infer its location, magnitude and source-focal mechanism as quickly as possible. If such information could be determined immediately, timely evacuations and emergency actions could be undertaken to mitigate earthquake damage. Current advanced methods can report the initial location and magnitude of an earthquake within...

OBJECTIVES This article sought to review and compare data of major earthquakes of the past decade and their aftermath in order to compare the magnitude, death toll, type of injuries, management procedures, extent of destruction and effectiveness of relief efforts. MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective study of the various aspects of management and aftermath of 5 major earthquakes of the past ...

The recent large earthquakes have emphasized the importance of earthquake loss mitigation and how earthquake early warning (EEW) systems can help. An EEW system detects an earthquake initiation based on a seismic sensor network and broadcasts a warning of the predicted location and magnitude shortly before an earthquake hits a site. The typical range of this lead time is around tens of seconds ...

For civil protection reasons there is a strong need to improve the inventory of areas that are more vulnerable to earthquake ground motions or to earthquake-related secondary effects, such as landslides, liquefaction or soil amplifications. The use of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods along with the related geo-databases can assist local and national authorities to...

Earthquakes can and do happen in the Southeastern United States. In areas where earthquakes are likely to occur, knowledge of where and how to build structures can be helpful in reducing property damage. In this study, a detailed earthquake analysis of an existing high-rise structure located in the southeast region of the United States is performed. The analysis is based on the effects of past ...

In this paper a survey of the techniques and data sets used to evaluate earthquake damages using remote sensing tools is proposed. Starting from some preliminary definitions about earthquake damages, their evaluation scale and the difference between identification of damage “extent” and identification of damage “level”, the advantages and limits of different remote sensing data sets are present...