Variability of Business Characteristics Exposed to Building Damages from
Earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area
Abstract
Understanding the exposure of business characteristics like its
location, sector, size, age, and owner demographics and structure to
building damages from an earthquake can inform business continuity
planning and broader community and regional programs and policies for
business recovery. A baseline analysis was performed for the HayWired
scenario (Wein, Haveman and others, 2019) using business characteristic
data from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) which showed
that location and sector are strong differentiators of disruptive
building damage risk, while minority ownership, branch ownership
structure, and low revenue are other above average differentiators. The
HayWired analysis was limited by damage information at the census tract
scale for occupancy classes (per the Federal Emergency Management Agency
Hazus software). In this study, we expand the analysis to multiple
earthquake scenarios and apply machine learning techniques to generate
building level assessments instead of census tract level. Association of
business characteristics with building damages by location increases the
analysis resolution providing more nuanced understanding and analyzing
across multiple scenarios shows the variability of business
characteristic exposure to different earthquakes for the region and
across communities. Anne Wein, Jon Haveman, Cynthia Kroll, Jeff Peters.
2019. Characteristics of Businesses disrupted by Building Damages from
the HayWired Scenario Mainshock, in press.