Integrated GIS, Remote Sensing and Survey Data for Damage Assessment of Buildings in Tsunami Event, Ishinomaki City, Japan

Abstract

The 2011 Tsunami event in the eastern coastal area of Japan caused a huge amount of damages or devastations on buildings. To this date, several field surveys have been conducted which provide detailed information about inundation areas and building damage characteristics in attacking east coastal areas by this tsunami. In this study, building damage data of Ishinomaki city, with special attention to the plain coast affected area, are classified and analyzed using data surveyed by the Ministry of Lands, Infrastructure and Transportation of Japan (MLIT) for more than 52,000 structures. The classification includes information on six levels of damage, four types of building materials and damages due to tsunami inundation for each building material which are necessary information for an effective hazard mitigation. Notably, damage level percentage distribution of different building materials is plotted for different inundation depth ranges in several sets of figures. This graphic illustration not only shows a better resistant performance of Reinforced Concrete (RC) and steel buildings over wood or other buildings for all inundation depth ranges, but also can explain clearly the inundation-induced damage behavior for each building material as well as the threshold depth for each damage level. Moreover, this research contains an analysis of vulnerable areas due to the coastal topography and the geographical factors. Surveyed data provided by Geospatial information authority of Japan (GSI) that classifies Ishinomaki plain coast area into three classes are compared with the damage map produced using an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology in ArcGIS 10.2 environment. The influence of key geographical features on tsunami-induced building damage, notably Kitakami river and water canals flooding, is taken into account with respect to the weighting of factors. A good agreement produced building damage map with surveyed GSI data shows the power of a GIS tool based on the AHP approach for tsunami damage assessment. The results of this study are useful to understand the damage behavior of buildings with different structural materials located in coastal areas vulnerable to the tsunami disaster.