1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

A ShakeOut exercise was planned to help understand potential impacts and prepare for a large earthquake in the Quebec City region, Canada. Scientific and technical knowledge was provided as the basis for a simple “drop, cover, hold on” procedure at home, school or workplace. More elaborated table top emergency exercises will also be developed for decision making by government departments and agencies. Evaluation of negative impacts was conducted for a ‘what-if’ M6.5 scenario earthquake with an epicentral distance of about 15 km from the Old downtown and a depth of 10 km. This hypothetical scenario was arbitrarily assigned a date, February 8th, when the outside temperature drops below -10 oC, and time, 3:00 pm, when most people are at school or work. Physical damage and social and economic losses were predicted using the ER2 user-friendly risk assessment tool. The analyses were run for site specific inventory of structural types of buildings and their occupancies, microzonation maps and ground motion maps for peak ground acceleration and spectral accelerations at periods of 0.3 and 1.0 seconds. The average number of injuries requiring medical care was estimated at more than 2,800 with 50 fatalities. The respective direct economic loss due to structural, non-structural and content damage to buildings was about $4.2B with more than 4,000 heavily damaged red-tagged buildings. Potential permanent ground displacements and damage to critical infrastructures were approximated and described qualitatively. A brief narrative of the disaster scenario is given at the end to summarize the activities, actions, decisions and solutions by the Crisis Management Team.