A new technology predicts the impact of earthquakes on city hospitals – ScienceDaily

In an increasingly urbanized world, population density often leads to more deaths and injuries when cities are struck by floods, hurricanes, landslides and other disasters.

But risks to life and limbs are compounded when earthquakes are the factor of destruction, as they not only kill and maim, but they can also paralyze hospitals needed to treat survivors.

Now, an international research team led by the Stanford Bloom Center for Earthquake Engineering has developed a methodology to help disaster preparedness officials in large cities create district-level contingency plans to ensure that emergency responders can move patients to hospital facilities that are likely to remain in service after an earthquake.

“Previously, most hospital preparedness plans could only look at smaller areas because they focus on individual hospitals,” said Anne Keremedjian, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and co-author, with her colleague Greg Deerlin, in an article published in Nature. Communications.

The regional earthquake response is not entirely new in earthquake-prone California, where after the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency used shortwave radios and pork to coordinate patient movement among the 76 hospitals in the damage area.

To ensure hospitals survive, the California state legislature mandated that all acute care hospitals be raised to current earthquake standards by 2030. “We need to ensure that hospitals remain operational to treat patients and avoid further loss of life,” Deierlein said.

The new research provides disaster response officials in seismically active countries such as Turkey, Chile, Indonesia, or Peru an effective but relatively simple way to create regional contingency plans: Start by using statistical risk analysis models to estimate where deaths and injuries are most likely to occur in densely populated urban areas; Applying building performance evaluation techniques to determine the amount of damage that may be exposed to different hospitals; He charted the best route between hospitals if the need arises to transfer injured patients to less damaged facilities with available capacity

The new regional planning methodology comes at a time when the world is waking up to the consequences of population growth and dense urbanization. When researchers looked at 21,000 disasters that have occurred worldwide since 1900, half of those with the most casualties have occurred within the past 20 years. For example, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in the Turkish city of Izmit injured nearly 50,000 injuries and disrupted 10 major hospitals.

Luis Severino, who coordinated the research as a PhD candidate in civil engineering at Stanford University, said the paper focused on what happened in 2007, after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck Pisco, about 150 miles from Lima, Peru. Pisco lost more than half of its total hospital beds in a few minutes.

Severino also worked with two other experts on hospital responses, Professor Celso Bambarin of the University of Peru Caiitano Heredia in Peru and Judith Mitrani Raiser of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, who compiled damage assessments after the earthquake from the Pisco earthquake and the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that occurred in 2005. 2010 near Maule on the central coast of Chile, data also helping to enrich the new methodology.

“Hospital systems are at the core of disaster resilience. Cities need regional contingency plans to ensure hospitals, doctors and medical teams are ready. To care for the most vulnerable populations,” said Severino, who will become assistant professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University in 2021.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Stanford School of Engineering. Original by Tom Abbate. Note: The content can be modified according to the style and length.

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