A Framework for Regional Scale Quantitative Landslide Risk Analysis
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Pollock, William
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Wartman, Joseph
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
University of Washington
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2020
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
470
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
University of Washington
Text preceding or following the note
2020
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Landslides are among the most common and damaging natural hazards on earth. Policy makers, land use planners, and community members need to know not only when and where landslides are likely to occur (hazard) but also the consequences on the human-built environment (risk). Existing methods for quantitative landslide hazard analysis contain several critical limitations, including oversimplification of the diverse range of landslide phenomena, computationally expensive models which prohibit application on local or regional scales, dependence on costly and rare landslide inventories, and deterministic methods which do not account for uncertainty in environmental and human inputs. Landslide hazard is rarely translated into landslide risk due to a lack of quantitative data necessary to model landslide runout and estimate the vulnerability of people, buildings, and infrastructure. I address these challenges through the development and validation of a multimodal, regional scale framework for coseismic and precipitation-induced landslide risk analysis which implements physically-based models in a probabilistic system. I develop new tools to characterize landslide runout and the vulnerability of elements at risk. By applying the multimodal landslide risk analysis framework at two study regions, I explore questions at the intersection of natural hazards, human ecology, and policy-making. In the country of Lebanon, geologic risk has soared due to the influx of 1.5 million refugees fleeing the civil war in neighboring Syria. I examine the temporal and spatial patterns of landslide risk within Lebanon, noting the impact of refugee resettlement policies and illustrating the utility of real-time risk analyses for immediate refugee crisis response. Seattle, Washington, is one of the most landslide-prone urban areas in the United States. However, up until now, no estimates of landslide risk have been available for land use decision-making in the region. I perform a probabilistic landslide hazard and risk analysis for the city of Seattle, providing quantitative, spatially explicit estimates of landslide-related losses in future precipitation and earthquake events. By disaggregating the unique consequences of Seattle's various types of landslides, this work informs targeted risk mitigation strategies to protect individuals and the built environment from preventable landslide losses.