Annual Meeting - SCEC.org

Abstracts | Plenary Presentations
earthquake processes and impacts might yield a greater ability to prepare for such an event and
mitigate its negative effects. Questions with potentially 1st-order impacts on scenario impacts
include: more detailed knowledge of the relative activity and geometry of various traces of the
Southern San Andreas fault system; continued advances to a the community velocity model; a
regional, detailed liquefaction model; various enhancements to our model of fire following
earthquake; detailed knowledge of the building stock and the likely behavior of the older concrete,
steel, and woodframe buildings that contribute so heavily to life-safety risk; a public loss model
that employs dynamic structural analysis and other concepts of modern performance-based
earthquake engineering; an up-to-date, dynamic model of seismic lifeline damage and interaction;
a mechanistic model of human injuries in earthquake-damaged buildings; and a mechanistic model
of cost increases in catastrophic earthquakes.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008 – 09:30
USING THE SHAKEOUT SCENARIO: A PRACTITIONER'S PERSPECTIVE
Tognazzini RA
The purpose of this presentation is to describe how the Los Angeles City Department of Water and
Power (LADWP) used the ShakeOut Scenario over the first six months of this year, culminating in
a full-scale exercise on July 16 and 17, 2008. The presentation will cover the motivation behind the
adoption of the ShakeOut Scenario, the opportunities that it offered, the training that resulted in
the full-scale exercise, and the results that were realized in the Nation’s largest municipally owned
utility. The presentation will also provide information that indicates LADWP’s need to improve its
infrastructure, emergency management procedures, and emergency response resources to prevent
the ShakeOut Scenario from being a catastrophic event for the City of Los Angeles.
Scenario motivations included products from SCEC and its affiliates, mandates from regulatory
agencies, a recent major disaster, and several minor emergencies. The opportunity to use an
earthquake scenario that exercised all elements of the new emergency response procedures came
from the mandatory development of new emergency response plans in 2007, and the need to train
to the new plans, starting in 2008. The unstated goal of the full-scale exercise was to conduct the
largest and most complex demonstration of emergency management that LADWP has ever
undertaken in its 106-year history. The model adopted for this full-scale exercise was a series of
orientation and training exercises leading up to the full-scale exercise in July. This model has been
adopted by several other utilities in Southern California in preparation for the State’s Golden
Guardian Exercise in November 2008.
The results were that LADWP experienced an abnormally large number of customer-service outage
hours for its Power System, and lost a large amount of its aboveground water storage to fire
fighting for the Water System. For this ShakeOut Scenario to avoid becoming a catastrophe, nearly
4,000,000 people in the City of Los Angeles were required to curtail the use of both water and
power in unprecedented amounts for long periods.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008 – 15:30
ENGINEERING USE OF GROUND MOTIONS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Baker JW
Ground motions, and measures of ground motion intensity, serve as a link between seismology
and engineering for the purpose of earthquake risk assessment and performance-based earthquake
engineering. Engineers rely on earth scientists to quantify rates of earthquake activity and
associated ground shaking intensity at a site, and increasingly to provide simulated ground motion
time histories. As nonlinear dynamic structural analysis becomes increasingly common in
66 | Southern California Earthquake Center