Blast Risk Assessment of Wood Residential Buildings: West Fertilizer Plant Explosion Case
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 34, Issue 3
Abstract
To predict the hazard-induced risks of buildings and infrastructures and assess the losses caused by hazards, the fragility curve method is a common quantitative risk assessment procedure for civil structures. It has been popularly used for decades for different hazards including earthquakes, hazardous winds, tsunamis, and fires. However, there are limited reports regarding blast risk assessment of buildings using the fragility curve method. This study developed empirical blast fragility curves for wood residential buildings using the real 2013 West fertilizer plant explosion data. The development processes included five key steps: (1) selecting and calculating the blast hazard intensity measure and the air-blast incident overpressure; (2) selecting the damage states rating systems and classifying the damage state of each damaged building; (3) determining the frequency distribution of damaged buildings for each damage state; (4) proving the cumulative lognormal distribution function to describe the fragility relationship between the blast damage states and the blast hazard intensity measure; and (5) constructing the empirical fragility curves by fitting the building damage information to the selected fragility relationship distribution function. The resulted blast fragility curves of this study can be used by government officials to predict blast-induced damages of residential buildings, to plan the optimal locations and operational capacities of emergency facilities, to estimate total economic losses due to potential explosions, and to plan the social, physical and economic resilience of communities.
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Data Availability Statement
Some data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request, such as building damage pictures, ArcGIS geodatabase, and the fragility analysis document.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ACI-1640818. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 34 • Issue 3 • June 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 5, 2019
Accepted: Sep 23, 2019
Published online: Feb 29, 2020
Published in print: Jun 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jul 29, 2020
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