Seismic loss prediction for residential buildings in Christchurch

In 2010-2011, New Zealand experienced the most damaging earthquakes in its history, known as the Canterbury earthquake sequence (CES). It led to extensive damage to Christchurch buildings, infrastructure and its surroundings; affecting commercial and residential buildings. The direct economic losses represented 20% of New Zealand’s GDP in 2011. Owing to New Zealand’s particular insurance structure, the insurance sector contributed to over 80% of losses for a total of more than NZ$31 billion. Over NZ$11 billion of the losses arose from residential building claims and were covered either partially or entirely from the NZ government backed Earthquake Commission (EQC) EQcover insurance scheme.

In the process of resolving the claims, EQC collected detailed financial loss data, post-event observations, and building characteristics for each of the approximately 434,000 claims lodged following the CES. This coincided with the effort by the very active NZ earthquake engineering community, which exploited the event and collected extensive data on the ground shaking levels, soil conditions, and liquefaction occurrence throughout wider Christchurch, as a large scale outdoor experiment.

Related publications

Roeslin, S., Ma, Q., Wicker, J., & Wotherspoon, L. (2020). Data Integration for the Development of a Seismic Loss Prediction Model for Residential Buildings in New Zealand. In Communications in Computer and Information Science: Vol. 1168 CCIS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43887-6_8

Roeslin, S., Ma, Q., Chigullapally, P., Wicker, J., & Wotherspoon, L. (2020). Feature Engineering for a Seismic Loss Prediction Model Using Machine Learning, Christchurch Experience. Proceeding of the 17th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, 17WCEE.