Landslide Hazard Mapping of Earthquake Prone Transportation Areas - Case Study: Oat Mountain Area along Route 5 in the State of California

Abstract

The potential hazard caused by earthquake-triggered landslides is a great threat to the infrastructure of certain areas. These disasters cause million of dollars in damage each year and on average caused somewhere between twenty-five to fifty deaths each year according to USGS. In order to help prevent this from happening, or to help ensure that these areas are better protected, a type of landslide hazard mapping system needs to be developed. This project is designed to evaluate different areas to try and to determine the associated landslide displacement that given earthquake events would cause. By using a combination of GIS and displacement–based dynamic analysis, these areas can be located, assessed, and represented using a series of maps. These maps will depict the different potential threat levels and ultimately show potential earthquake-induced displacements that would occur in the Oat Mountain area along route 5 in California for a single earthquake event. The process will then hopefully be applied to a larger area, and then used to eventually encompass the most of the west coast. This framework can then be later extrapolated to look at the risk posed by different earthquakes over a larger region using a probabilistic approach to hazard analysis.