Seismic Resilience Evaluation of Hospital Buildings in Kocaeli City

Natural and human-induced hazards have caused major disasters in terms of loss of life and property for thousands of years. Coping with these losses will only be possible by creating disaster-resilient infrastructure. Structures such as health facilities, schools, and nuclear facilities, which must be used uninterruptedly, must be resilient during and after hazards. Turkey and its Kocaeli city are in a highly seismically active region and are frequently exposed to severe earthquakes. However, there still exist many infrastructure systems that have not yet been made resilient to earthquakes, and many lives and properties have continued to be lost from earthquake hazards. This was the case of the Kocaeli’s Mw 7.1 earthquake of 17 August 1999 and even the recent Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake of 6 February 2023, in which tens of thousands of people lost their lives and a large amount of financial loss was experienced. To better prepare for a future earthquake disaster for resilient critical infrastructures such as healthcare systems, it is important to study the urban earthquake risk of these facilities. This study proposed a probabilistic approach using the North Anatolian Fault to study the earthquake hazard of Kocaeli’s city and the related risk to healthcare buildings in the region. The seismic hazard for 2% and 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years confirmed the region's high seismicity and related risk to hospital buildings, alerting the local government in developing new plans and implementing earthquake risk mitigation strategies for this first needed health infrastructures.