TN Earthquake Risk Assessment

Project Snapshot

Client: Tennessee Earthquake Preparedness Group (Simulated Client)

Goal:

1. Explore factors that may indicate higher likelihoods of and damage caused by earthquakes

2. Examine the history of earthquakes in TN to determine which areas have been most affected by seismic activity in the Eastern and Western fault zones

Impact: Provide post-earthquake resource allocation recommendations based on risk assessments for 4 major cities in TN

Turnaround: 2 weeks (Oct 2020)

Programming Language: Python

Analytical Methods: Descriptive analytics, geospatial analysis

Tools: Jupyter notebook, pandas, numpy, requests, beautiful soup, re, bokeh, folium, geopandas, matplotlib, seaborn

My roles: Collaborative project (team lead) - met with a mock client to understand their business needs; retrieved data via web scraping; cleaned data using regular expressions; defined and operationalized our risk assessment metrics; visualized findings; presented recommendations to our client

Link to Git Repository

Description

• The Tennessee Earthquake Preparedness Group (TEPG) is a quasi-governmental agency responsible for creating plans to mitigate loss in the event of an earthquake in Tennessee and allocating funds to support these plans

• Given that Tennessee is home to the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) and the East Tennessee Seismic Zone (ETSZ) which have been associated with hazardous earthquakes in the past, help TEPG decide whether and how to allocate resources

Findings & Recommendations

• Although there have been over 4,000 earthquakes with their epicenters in Tennessee since 1900, on average they've typically been small (average magnitude 1.65)

• Priority access of TEPG's resources should be based on an area's proximity to seismically active areas, municipal resources, and community profiles (the vulnerability of various populations who would be impacted)

• We adapted Florida International University's disaster risk equation to calculate our own risk metric for areas in TN

• Our analyses included mid-range risk probability scores and worst-case scenario risk probability scores

• We recommend that TEPG formulate a plan that allocates the greatest number of resources to Shelby county

  • • They are a highly populated county closest to an active seismic zone

    • They have a lot of people, property, and systems that will be negatively impacted by an earthquake

    • They have a more vulnerable population (i.e., lower SES indicators) compared to Davidson, Hamilton, and Knox counties

Git Repository

For more details and to see my code, check out this project's repo