Earthquake and Severe Wind Exposure and Vulnerability Workshop

I talked about two topics at the recent Earthquake and Severe Wind Exposure and Vulnerability Workshop held on 12-13 March 2010 in Tagaytay City, Philippines, organized by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS), the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) and Geoscience Australia (GA).  The 3 proponents aim to better understand and reduce risks associated with natural hazards in the Philippines, building upon existing tools and methods to estimate impact for local natural hazard events.

The workshop follows the highly successful Philippine Earthquake Exposure and Vulnerability Workshop held on 14-15 November 2009, Clark Airfield, Pampanga, Philippines which laid the framework for natural hazard risk assessments in the Philippines.  The workshop builds upon lessons from the previous meeting and develop a basic suite of vulnerability models for common structural types in the Philippines, which can subsequently be used in severe wind and earthquake impact assessments.  It is intended that these initial models will be refined and updated through future activities to be discussed on the second day of the workshop.

The topics I spoke about are:

• Implications of Philippine Building Regulation Development to Wind Resistance (i.e. implied wind resistance [as 3s wind gust] for compliant structures, and level of compliance of schema building categories with time)
• Wind Loading on Towers

Everything was quite interesting, but I was interested most in the presentation on Wind Damage to Tower Structures by Adam Abinales, and Wind Impact Framework and Vulnerability Models by Craig Arthur.  Carlos Villaraza spoke about the Development of the Wind Loading Provisions in the National Structural Code of the Philippines, which was largely based on the COE-TPU Philippines Country Report I prepared back in 2005.  Benny Pacheco, Director of the University of the Philippines - Institute of Civil Engineering (UP ICE), and Mark Edwards, leading the team from GA, came up with the flow of the workshop program and made a number of presentations as well.