Seismic Risk Evaluation of Wood Houses Considering Aged Deterioration and Long-term Occurrence Probability of Earthquakes

The in-service period of residential houses in Japan are too short compared with the return period of earthquakes. Therefore, it is necessary to consider aged deterioration when we measure the effectiveness of seismic retrofit against plate subduction-zone earthquakes and inland shallow earthquake to occur in several decades in Japan. This paper presents a method for predicting earthquake damage probability and seismic loss of wood houses considering aged deterioration affected by biodeterioration and maintenance status as well as their seismic performance and local seismic hazard. In order to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method and discuss how to prepare for the coming earthquakes, we have performed two types of seismic risk evaluation. One is the damage probability evaluation of houses for the scenario earthquakes, the Nankai and/or Tonankai earthquake or inland shallow earthquakes, by assuming their occurrence time. The other is seismic loss evaluation of houses considering the long-term occurrence probabilities for active faults on land and subduction-zone earthquakes which are evaluated and announced to the public by the Subcommittee for Long-term Evaluations of the Earthquake Researc