EARTHQUAKE HAZARD MITIGATION IN URBAN AREAS BY THE INTEGRATION OF SOCIO AND ENGINEERING APPROACH

ABSTRACT: The vulnerability to earthquake hazards of urban areas such as Tokyo has increased with the wide spread of complex social systems. In order to solve such difficulties for hazard mitigation in urban area, a new approach of social engineering with the integration of engineering technology and socio-economic knowledge is presented in this paper. This approach stresses the necessity of the integration of knowledge from various research disciplines of which concept is composed of different components. Firstly, this paper describes the general concept of the proposed social engineering approach and study of damage propagation process based on the review of past large earthquakes. Secondly, in respond to the business continuity management (BCM) of private sectors, availability of effective technical tools is presented along the time axis of earthquake occurrence. As well as reinforcing and upgrading the weak facilities before earthquakes, herein, a real time mitigation system (named Kajima Incident Command System) applied for during an earthquake is presented by using several useful tools. By the integration of engineering tools and socio-economic knowledge, more realistic hazard mitigation systems can be constructed which is possible to apply for the damage mitigation especially in mega cities