Projects | preetish kakoty

Earthquake Risk Tolerance for Building Codes

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Building codes and supporting standards are central to managing life-safety risks in earthquakes. Recent advances in risk-based design make acceptable risk thresholds explicit. These thresholds determine the demands used in design, which in turn influence the form and size of structures that can be built.

Selecting appropriate thresholds, however, is complex and requires balancing current practice, societal expectations, and regulatory objectives. This project compiles and compares life-safety risk thresholds used by regulators worldwide, adopting annual individual fatality risk (AIFR) as the common metric. The analysis highlights significant cross-regional differences and the role of local hazard contexts and public perception.

It argues for a tiered framework for acceptable vs. tolerable risk, contextualizing AIFR within broader societal risks and informing updates to New Zealand’s building code — and potentially beyond.

Earthquake Fatality Risk Tolerance: What risk thresholds should be used in setting building code provisions? (In preparation)

👥 Collaborators

Ken Elwood
Caleb Dunne
Anne M Hulsey
Charlotte Brown

Review of Existing Data and Models for Wellington's Earthquake Risk

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This collaborative project gathers information across domains to build a comprehensive picture of seismic risk in Wellington. Contributions include hazard modelling, infrastructure exposure, vulnerability assessments, and community preparedness studies — across both regional and national scopes.

The review will form the basis for a co-authored paper highlighting the current state of knowledge, gaps in data and modeling approaches, and opportunities for integrated seismic risk modelling in Wellington. It invites participation from researchers and practitioners across disciplines to develop an open and shared foundation for future risk reduction efforts.

📰 Journal Article

Wellington’ Seismic Risk: A State-of-the-Art Review of Data and Models (In preparation)

Selection of Earthquake Scenarios for Wellington

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earthquake scenarios are critical within the context of seismic risk assessments, supporting effective risk communication and informing long-term policy decisions for risk mitigation. They also enable detailed analysis of cascading hazards such as landslides, liquefaction, and tsunamis. Despite their utility, a standardized framework for selecting representative scenarios from probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) models remains absent.

This research addresses this gap by proposing a systematic framework to select representative earthquake scenarios using disaggregation data from national-scale PSHA models. A case study focused on Wellington, New Zealand, utilizing the 2022 national seismic hazard model, is presented to highlight the implementation of the framework. This study outlines the selection process, performs seismic hazard analysis for the selected deterministic scenarios, and conducts residual analysis to compare scenario-based hazard estimates with probabilistic models, exploring their relevance.

📰 Journal Article

Framework for Selecting Representative Earthquake Scenarios for Regional Risk Simulation (In preparation)

📰 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Ken Elwood
Chris Di Caprio
Sanjay S Bora

Collapse Risk of Non-Ductile Concrete Shear Wall Buildings

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This project assesses the collapse risk of older tall buildings in Vancouver that use non-ductile reinforced concrete shear walls (RCSW). These buildings—constructed prior to ductile detailing requirements in the mid-1980s—house thousands of residents, many of whom are low-income or elderly.

The study proposes a data-driven archetype generation framework using a random forest regression model trained on a detailed inventory of 350 buildings. It creates 25 archetypes across five height categories (10–30 stories) and models each using nonlinear response history analysis under hazard-consistent ground motions.

📖 Journal Article

Collapse Risk of Non-Ductile Tall Reinforced Concrete Shear Wall Buildings (ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, 2026)

🎤 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Toward Functional Recovery in the Seismic Design of Tall Buildings

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This project contributes to the evolution of seismic design philosophy by shifting from life-safety-driven objectives toward functional recovery—the ability for buildings to be inspected, repaired, and reoccupied within a reasonable timeframe following an earthquake.

It synthesizes insights from structural and nonstructural systems, real earthquake case studies, and emerging policy objectives to propose a performance-based framework for recovery-based design. The emphasis is on tall buildings, which are particularly critical in urban recovery due to their vertical complexity and concentrated occupancy. This project was carried out for the City and County of San Francisco through ATC-119 project.

📖 Journal Article

Toward Functional Recovery in the Seismic Design of Modern Tall Buildings (Earthquake Spectra, 2021)

🎤 Conference Presentation

Seismic Performance of Tall Buildings Designed Following Non-prescriptive Design Procedures (12th Canadian Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Quebec City, 2019)

👥 Collaborators

Carlos Molina Hutt
Anne M. Hulsey
Greg Deierlein
Alireza Eksir Monfared
Yen Wen-Yi
John D. Hooper

Georgia Basin Amplification Factors for M9 Cascadia Earthquakes

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This project quantifies long-period spectral acceleration amplification due to the Georgia sedimentary basin in Metro Vancouver.

Using a suite of 30 broadband simulations of M9 Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes, we benchmark ground motions against national models and derive period-dependent basin amplification factors (BAFs). These factors are validated using empirical data from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake and used to propose a framework for modifying Uniform Hazard Spectra (UHS) to better reflect the amplification effects.

The findings have implications for seismic hazard mapping, performance-based design, and future editions of the National Building Code of Canada.

📖 Journal Article

🎤 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Carlos Molina Hutt
Sai Mithra Dyaga
Hadi Ghofrani
Sheri Molnar

Projects | preetish kakoty

Earthquake Risk Tolerance for Building Codes

📰 Related Publication

👥 Collaborators

Review of Existing Data and Models for Wellington's Earthquake Risk

📰 Related Publication

📰 Journal Article

Selection of Earthquake Scenarios for Wellington

📰 Related Publication

📰 Journal Article

📰 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Collapse Risk of Non-Ductile Concrete Shear Wall Buildings

📰 Related Publication

📖 Journal Article

🎤 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Toward Functional Recovery in the Seismic Design of Tall Buildings

📰 Related Publication

📖 Journal Article

🎤 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators

Georgia Basin Amplification Factors for M9 Cascadia Earthquakes

📰 Related Publication

📖 Journal Article

🎤 Conference Presentation

👥 Collaborators