In Challenge of Approaching Casualties and Injured People Due to a Damaging Earthquake

Abstract

During big earthquakes, one of the challenges for the decision maker is the estimation of the resources for the attention of the disaster which is computed based on the casualties and injured people, which is generated by damaging earthquake. In this investigation, two criteria for the estimation of casualties during damaging earthquake were presented for Mw > 6.5 in one target area, namely, Chorrillos district in the Lima metropolitan. First criterion considers the compilation of existing data that reports the casualties on damaged cities with a population density involved, considering the lifestyle, the time of occurrence, the season of the year, that could influence in the number of victims, which is normalized to avoid temporary effects in the estimation. The second criterion considers the output generated prior computed process such earthquake hazard, microzoning and risk analysis of the target area. Here a series of identification of parameters has been computed such as location of the source of earthquake, depth and epicentral distance, distribution of population, social levels, and others, to estimate the risk. For the computing of the number of casualties in the affected area, a relation between the magnitude and risk is developed. Both criteria provided results which with an uncertain measure, but not so far from each other. That gives us confidence in this approach. Also, we evaluate the estimation with the major earthquake’s scenarios for the region especially in Peru, with reasonable results.