Under destructive earthquakes, a medical sector should play a crucial role for taking care of injured people. Hospital building should also maintain their function. By the way, since a hospital has a system like a city, composing of buildings and many LIFELINE systems, seismic reliability of the hospital is not determined only by building but by LIFELINE facilities including inside and outside the hospital. Present paper proposes a seismic risk assessment method for hospital LIFELINE as a part of the Seismic Risk Management method. The assessment method is to evaluate availability of hospital systems, considering damage probability of building and LIFELINE facilities, and the loss related to pipeline damage. The proposed method is applied to ten hospitals in Osaka, and its applicability is discussed.

At 5:26 am local time, Friday, December 26, 2003, an earthquake with moment magnitude 6.5 hit the city of Bam in southeast Iran. The earthquake caused more than 26,000 deaths, 30,000 injuries, and left 70,000 homeless. It caused extensive damage to residential and commercial buildings and emergency response facilities. In contrast to the inflicted human loss and suffering and extended building damage, LIFELINE systems, although damaged, performed much better. Transportation systems, i.e., roads, bridges, railways, and the airport, although slightly to moderately damaged, were generally operational soon after the earthquake to support emergency response and recovery effort. There were several breaks in the water distribution systems and minor damage to deep wells. However, the traditional qanat systems, which bring water from foothills tens of kilometers away via underground tunnels, were mostly damaged. The Bam area is served via connection to countrywide electric grid system. There was little damage to high voltage transmission lines and towers and minor damage to electric equipment in the main substation. Numerous concrete poles were damaged in the distribution system. There was nonstructural damage to telecom central offices. The main reason for the good performance of the LIFELINE facilities was that most of them are located outside the zone that was heavily damaged. Another reason is that they are newer facilities and in general more engineering has been used in LIFELINE facilities design and construction when compared with that for residential buildings.

This paper studies the LIFELINE of women under methadone treatment, by using qualitative research method and phenomenological interpretation studies. Hence, in-depth interviews have been conducted with 15 women under treatment at the Drop in Center (DIC). In this study, the LIFELINE of women was studied in two periods of before and after consumption. Results show that five main categories including anomy in the family, living in deviation-oriented families, marital crises, victimization experiences, and attempts to heal and curiosity and adventure have been identified in the study that show how women are on the trail of drug use. Furthermore, results show that women interviewed in describing their course of life in post-use period have narrated several narratives of narcotic effects on their lives, classified in four categories including consumption and physical and mental transformation, consumption and increasing sexual relations, the collapse of the family, and declining social status.

Consequential damages assessment is one of the main steps in determining the risk of road transport network against incident such as earthquakes. According to the increase of existing damages, we are present a solution to mitigate the damages. As the appropriate size of the damage is provided, the recovery's more accurate cost is evaluated. Determining the amount less than acceptable value will increase future damages, and on the other hand, determining an amount more than necessary increases safety, but it will increase maintenance cost. In this research, the authors argue what amount of damage can be acceptable concerning the amount of possible damage to a road and its infrastructures affected by the earthquake and its post-disaster consequences regarding in the terms of initial recovery time and final recovery time. In this regard, the authors provide a method for calculating acceptable Consequential damage based on two social and economic perspectives, including obtaining the expert’, s opinions and authorities and investigating the damage to the transportation network. Earthquake intensity is considered in three categories: severe, moderate and mild, and the road performance is considered in four categories: freeway, highway, main and secondary roads. Besides, we used the validation methods for implementing our method were performed in 16 cases. The results of this research showed that within the four effective parameters which had a pleasing effect on the amount of damage are including topographic states, the existence of infrastructures, the presence or absence of alternative paths, and the significance of the origin-destination of the roads,Topographic states has the most effective among the parameters.

Earthquakes could have catastrophic impacts on tunnels and buried structures. Liquefaction phenomenon is one of the most destructive effects of earthquakes. Liquefaction results in decreasing effective stress and this consequently leads to decreases in shear strength of the soil. As a result, large deformation in both soil and buried structure occurs. Moreover, liquefaction causes soil boiling, lateral spreading, structure settlement and the uplift of buried structure. In many earthquake cases, uplift of the buried structure due to liquefaction was reported as one of the major damaging factors. This research sought to model earthquake induced uplift of buried structures including tunnels in the soil susceptible to liquefaction under seismic loading. Two dimensional finite difference modeling is employed to simulate centrifuge experiments. The UBCSAND model was adopted as constitutive model in numerical simulations. The modeling results are compared with the measurements of centrifuge experiment and the capabilities of the model to predict the liquefaction of soil around tunnels are assessed.

The paper will provide a summary of all LIFELINEs performance in this strong earthquake. The paper will discuss the damage, emergency response, and recovery of electric power, telecommunication, transportation (roads and bridges), seaports, airports, water and wastewater, and their facilities. The impact as a result of the LIFELINEs service interruption will be discussed; most important is the discussion of LIFELINEs interdependence. Each LIFELINE will be separated into its own section that presents the failure modes, emergency response, and recovery of service. Each section will end with observations and recommendations.

LIFELINE networks, such as water, electricity, telecommunications, transportation, oil and gas, are the most vulnerable LIFELINEs in natural and man-made disasters. Considering the interdependency between these LIFELINEs, the evaluation of LIFELINE behavior and modeling of seismic interaction between them is essential.Power network has the most influence and importance among the LIFELINEs because of its critical role in the performance of the other LIFELINEs. In assessment of seismic reliability, the calculations of LIFELINE with the effect of power network are quite necessary. The assessment of the effect of electricity in the behavior of other LIFELINEs is very sophisticated and its complicated process requires numerous details. This has resulted in errors in available researches. Indeed, neglection and consideration of the electricity power effect requires careful and accurate assessment, even in the case of using graphs and standards from HAZUS and Risk-UE. It should be noted that electricity power effect has already been considered in fragility curves. In this paper, after addressing the exact evaluation of electricity power network, and introducing its calculation process in seismic interaction studies, the results are used to model the effect of electricity power in seismic performance assessment of water network in district 6 of Tehran. The results can be used for all kinds of LIFELINE calculations such as loss estimation, risk assessment or LIFELINEs interaction analysis.

Elevated water tanks supported by the reinforced concrete (RC) Staging are classified as inverted pendulum structures. These are considered as structures of high post-earthquake importance and should remain functional after the seismic events. National codes of various countries recommend Force-Based Design (FBD) procedure for water tank staging, which does not ensure nonlinear performance level for a given hazard. Therefore, it becomes necessary to design these structures with a performance-based design approach like Direct Displacement-Based Design (DDBD). Many design engineers consider that the behavior of frame staging of the elevated water tank is similar to the building's frame and generally adopt the same design principles for both types of structures. However, the seismic behavior of the building frame is significantly different from frame staging due to the absence of diaphragm action at the bracing level and concentrated mass at the top level only. Therefore, it may not be rational to utilize the same DDBD procedure of the building's frame for the design of frame staging of the elevated water tanks. The present study proposes some modification in existing DDBD procedure (used for the design of frame building) based on the nonlinear time history analysis of twenty meters high RC frame staging with four different configurations. The modifications are proposed in terms of inelastic displacement profile, design displacement, effective height, and effective mass calculation. Further, the performance of the same RC frame staging designed using the proposed DDBD procedure has been assessed using nonlinear static and dynamic analyses to verify the suitability of proposed modifications.