Analysis of the seismic vulnerability and the structural characteristics of houses in Chinese rural areas

Disastrous earthquakes brought extensive damage to rural houses not designed to resist seismic movements in China. So far, the paucity of nation-wide data on rural houses, especially on their structural features, has prevented a comprehensive national assessment of the earthquake vulnerability of rural areas. This paper estimates the proportion of rural houses in each of five different structural groups in county-level administration units in China with downscaling methods and assesses the seismic vulnerability of counties paying attention to the seismic intensity and social–economic characteristics of different areas. A housing damage index is constructed with the expected amount and ratio of damaged houses in earthquakes, based on which four vulnerability levels are specified for each county-level unit. The results show that highly vulnerable and vulnerable counties account for 7.9 % and 10.7 % of all, respectively. Based on the distribution of these counties, the critical factors of weakness in different regions, such as seismic intensity, housing quality and population density, are analyzed, and risk reduction strategies are discussed.