Earthquake and socio-economic vulnerability assessment in Dhaka city

Earthquake is one of the most extreme hazards that cannot be measured out of all the natural hazard reported. It has a major ability to degrade an urban socio-economic structure with geological components. For this reason, the main objective of this thesis is to assess the seismic vulnerability with socioeconomic aspects in terms of minimal loss of life and damage. In this research, a strategy for vulnerability evaluation has been developed for earthquake-prone areas in Dhaka District of Bangladesh. 240 different residential buildings within three selected wards of Dhaka city were selected to take an interview of building’s owner for statistical studies which is a simple coding system to collect the data provided in the questionnaires. After that, calculated the proportion of respondents answering for each category of each question by SPSS software. This data was then utilized in a simple additive weighting (SAW) method to find out the most fragile area within the selected territory based on the social and economic status. The results revealed that ward no. 51 was the most vulnerable area against earthquakes according to social vulnerability, whereas ward no. 46 was more susceptible to earthquake due to economic vulnerability. The assessment outcome can be used to prepare urban emergency response to protect human life, economy.