Application of USGS ShakeCast for Rapid Post-Earthquake Assessment of Critical Infrastructure Facilities in Western Australia

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

The National Earthquake Alerts Centre (NEAC) at Geoscience Australia (GA) operationally provides alerts on earthquake events in the region which include Shakemap. This paper describes a pilot project in the NEAC to provide added information to these alert products to give indications to key asset owners of potential damage. The USGS ShakeCast is an example of such a system that uses USGS Shakemap and provides near-real-time post-earthquake impact and inspection metrics for critical infrastructure facilities following an event. This enables asset owners and infrastructure operators to prioritise damage inspections. GA is undertaking a project entitled “Risk Assessment and Mitigation Study for Earthquakes in the Yilgarn” (RAMSEY) in a collaboration with the Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM) and five Western Australian government partners. The key focus of the project was to understand critical infrastructure system risk with geographically dispersed assets in the Yilgarn region in land from Perth. One key issue raised by project partners is the need to effectively prioritise inspection resources following an earthquake where there are many assets exposed to strong shaking. As a response to this need, the USGS ShakeCast application has been operationalised in the NEAC as a pilot for the RAMSEY partners using the vulnerability knowledge developed through the project on bridges. In this paper the input requirements for the system and the products provided are described in the context of a scenario event. Furthermore, the benefits and limitations of the system are discussed along with feedback from the partners on utility in informing the potential development of a broader capability.

Presented at the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) National Conference 2024

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Field Value
Title Application of USGS ShakeCast for Rapid Post-Earthquake Assessment of Critical Infrastructure Facilities in Western Australia
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/ce674b91-959a-4d24-9e67-95f91e6fdc32
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Application of USGS ShakeCast for Rapid Post-Earthquake Assessment of Critical Infrastructure Facilities in Western Australia". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/application-of-usgs-shakecast-for-rapid-post-earthquake-assessment-of-critical-infrastructure-f