A New Model for Improving Safety Level ofUrban Fabrics to Earthquakes by Locating Search and Rescue Bases

Urban fabrics in developing countries are growing rapidly, without sufficient attention to sustainable development criteria. Nowadays, there are many big cities that accommodate millions of residents, while most of them are exposed to natural hazards. Accordingly, the growth rate of big cities has been considerable inIran especially during the last decades. More than 70 percentages of population are now living in urban areas, while 60 years ago this proportion was vice versa. This has caused further exposure of human lives to natural disasters, including strong earthquakes. Therefore, in the occurrence of an earthquake in such fabrics, heavy destruction and considerable socio-economic consequences can be expectable .In order to reduce the potential impacts of earthquakes in such cities, different measures could be taken into account to mitigate vulnerability and increase coping capacities. However, due to the shortages of technical and financial resources, especially in developing countries like Iran, priority activities should be selected based on the acceptable risk level and available capacities to determine the most feasible and effective interventions in different urban zones. Therefore, it is necessary to develop appropriate methodologies to be used for prioritization of applicable risk reduction and disaster management measures .In this paper, a new approach is developed to assess the existing earthquake risk in urban fabrics. For this purpose, different physical as well as socio-economic parameters affecting the safety level of urban areas have been identified and classified to understand their impacts on earthquake risk level. The parameters in the model and their weights have been determined based on expert judgments, using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). For this purpose, a questionnaire based survey has been implemented through city managers, engineers, planners and disaster management experts. According to the results of the survey, most important parameters and indicators have been selected and weighted. Additionally, the effects of different measures on improving response capacities and the efficiency of other applicable interventions on risk level have been evaluated .By applying this model, the effectiveness of developing community-based activities as well as the establishment of additional search and rescue bases for risk reduction have been evaluated and compared. The results revealed that besides the importance of capacity building in relevant search, rescue and relief organizations (such as fire-fighting stations or medical care centers), promoting public participation in disaster risk management activities can also be considered as an important priority in short-term planning to reduce earthquake risk and to improve response capacity .The proposed methodology can be applied for prioritizing risk reduction and management measures in any places based on local conditions, if the relevant parameters could be estimated locally. By using this decision support measure, the local managers might be able to evaluate the effectiveness of any different interventions on risk and safety level of urban fabrics, before approving intervention plans. This can help them to allocate the limited available budget to the most critical projects.