A revised (PTVA) model for assessing the vulnerability of buildings to tsunami damage

Abstract

The Papathoma Tsunami Vulnerability Assess- ment (PTVA) Model (Papathoma, 2003) was developed in the absence of robust, well-constructed and validated build- ing fragility models for assessing the vulnerability of build- ings to tsunami. It has proven to be a useful tool for pro- viding assessments of building vulnerability. We present an enhanced version (PTVA-3) of the model that takes account of new understanding of the factors that influence building vulnerability and significantly, introduce the use of the Ana- lytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weighting the various at- tributes in order to limit concerns about subjective ranking of attributes in the original model. We successfully test PTVA- 3 using building data from Maroubra, Sydney, Australia.