The Canadian response following the Haitian earthquake of 2010 was not solely focused on providing humanitarian assistance. Canada also used several immigration measures both at the federal level and the provincial level in Quebec in order to facilitate the immigration of eligible Haitians to Canada and their subsequent reunification with their Canadian family members. This thesis explores these immigration measures and evaluates their effectiveness. In addition, the research examines the role that the large Haitian Diaspora in Canada played in bringing about the adoption of a set of immigration measures specifically for Haitians. The research shows that the Canadian measures implemented were both multi-dimensional – as a variety of immigration mechanisms were used, and multi-level – as the Canadian response included both federal and provincial initiatives in Quebec. While a number of measures were introduced federally, none of these measures could be considered “special” as they were all possible under Canada’s immigration legislation, and they were not unique to the post-earthquake context. In contrast, Quebec’s Humanitarian Sponsorship Program for Haitians was very “special” in that it was the first time such a program was implemented for a large group of people. The research also points to the fact that although using immigration mechanisms to respond to a humanitarian crisis has its benefits, these mechanisms are not designed to provide prompt protection and relief to individuals affected by crisis situations. The research also demonstrates that the use of the available complementary protection measures (humanitarian and compassionate considerations, moratorium and protected person status) did not make up the primary thrust of the Canadian immigration response to the earthquake in Haiti. This fact is indicative of the inadequacy of these measures in providing protection to individuals displaced by environmental factors. Finally, it is argued that although the existence of a large Haitian Diaspora was influential in creating a climate open to the adoption of special measures for Haitians, the Haitian Diaspora did not necessarily influence the specifics of the measures adopted to a significant degree.

La zone de subduction entre les plaques Nazca et Amérique du Sud est une des régions les plus actives de notre planète. De grands tremblements de terre et tsunamis associés se produisent de façon récurrente presque tout au long de sa marge. Néanmoins, le segment de subduction au nord du Pérou (de lat.3oS à 9oS) est resté le seul segment sismiquement silencieux depuis les premières informations historiques sur les séismes qui remontent au XVème siècle. Avant les travaux présentés dans ce manuscrit, aucune information sur les processus accommodant la convergence de la plaque Nazca vers le continent Sud-Américain n’était disponible le long du segment de 1000km au nord Pérou et sud Equateur. Les techniques de géodésie spatiale, en particulier le GPS/GNSS, nous permettent de quantifier les mouvements à la surface de la plaque supérieure avec une précision millimétrique. Ces mesures, couplées à l'utilisation de modèles élastiques, nous permettent de déterminer le niveau du couplage intersismique le long de l'interface entre les plaques. Le but de ma thèse est d'étudier le cycle sismique et la déformation continentale le long de la zone de subduction du Pérou, avec un intérêt particulier pour son segment nord. Nous utilisons des mesures GPS acquises depuis 2008 dans le cadre d'un projet international (le projet Andes Du Nord, ANR- ADN). Le champ de vitesse GPS obtenu couvre l’ensemble de la marge de subduction péruvienne, avec des mesures dans la cordillère et dans une moindre mesure dans la région sub-Andine. L'analyse et la modélisation du champ de vitesse GPS ont permis d'obtenir les résultats suivants: Premièrement: nous mettons en évidence l'existence d'un nouveau domaine continental, que nous avons baptisé comme le sliver Inca et qui est en translation a une vitesse de 4-5 mm/an en direction sud-est par rapport au craton Sud Américain. Le sliver Inca s’étend tout le long de la marge péruvienne. / The Nazca/South American subduction zone is one of the most active regions on Earth. Large earthquakes and associated tsunamis occur recurrently almost all along its margin. Nevertheless, the ~1000 km long (from lat.2oS to 9oS) segment in northern Peru and southern Ecuador subduction has remained in relative seismic silence for at least the past five centuries. Before the work presented in this thesis, no information about the processes accommodating the convergence was available for this region and it was impossible to answer whether it could host a great Mw>8.5 earthquake in future or not. Nowadays, spatial geodesy, and more specifically GPS/GNSS enable us to quantify the surface displacement on the overriding plate with millimeter accuracy. Geodetic measurements together with the use of elastic models allow us to determine the amount of interseismic coupling at the plate interface. My thesis focuses on the seismic cycle and the continental deformation along the Peruvian subduction margin, with particular interest along its northern and central segments. We use GPS measurements acquired since 2008 in the frame of an international French-Peruvian- Ecuadorian project (the Andes Du Nord project, ADN). Our GPS velocity field covers the entire Peruvian subduction margin, with measurements in the Andean cordillera and part of the sub-Andean region. Modeling of GPS velocity field show the existence of a new tectonic microplate that we baptized as the Inca Sliver, which is in southeastward translation a rate of 4-5 mm/yr with respect to stable South America.

A model for stress and strain accumulation in strike slip earthquake faults is presented in which a finite width cuboidal fault region is embedded between two cuboidal tectonic plates. Elasto-plastic continuum constitutive equations model the gouge in the fault and the tectonic plates are linear elastic solids obeying the generalised Hooke's law. The model predicts a velocity field which is comparable to surface deformations. The plastic behaviour of the fault material allows the velocities in the tectonic plate to increase to values which are independent of the distance from the fault. Both of the non-trivial stress and strain components accumulate most significantly in the vicinity of the fault. The release of these strains during a dynamic earthquake event would produce the most severe deformations at the fault which is consistent with observations and the notion of an epicenter. The accumulations in the model, however, are at depths larger than would be expected. Plastic strains build up most significantly at the base of the fault which is in yield for the longest length of time but additionally is subject to larger temperatures which makes the material more ductile. The speed of propagation of the elasto-plastic boundary is calculated and its acceleration towards the surface of the fault may be indicative of a dynamic earthquake type event.

Diploma thesis is analysing specific aspects of spare parts logistics on practical situation of Renault Česká Republika, a.s. ("RCR") and its largest concessionaire, RENAULT RETAIL GROUP CZ, s.r.o. (formerly Renault Praha Zličín - "RPZ"). Elements of spare parts supply chain are described separately with focus on spare parts distribution centre in Györ, Hungary, which is later compared with similar centres of Škoda Auto and Toyota. Furthermore the inbound logistics processes of RCR is described and commented. Subsequent parts of the thesis focus on the analysis of spare parts warehouse with objective to improve the efficiency of stored references compound in order to eliminate dispensable references which are being stored. This improvement should therefore allow ameliorated fixing of invested cash flow and minimise the amount of references to be ordered urgently due to unsuitable composition of stock in storage. Finally the thesis deals with effects impact of severe events such, in particular with actual effect of Japanese earthquake on spare parts supply chain and optional measures to be taken to diversify and/or minimise such risks.

Focusing on the rising attention towards including the local population in humanitarian action, this study demonstrates how youth participation can produce effective results in a humanitarian response, making use of the post-disaster response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake as a case study. The research was intended to investigate the specific factors that enable youth participation to produce effective results in humanitarian programming, examining the methods that organisations used to involve youth, the benefits and challenges that arose from the process, and how effectiveness could be measured for the purpose of qualitative analysis. After constructing a conceptual framework around the key themes of the study, the thesis analysed the findings from 3 in-depth semi-structured interviews with informants from Restless Development Nepal, an organisation that actively involved youth volunteers in its emergency response. The activities which included these youth volunteers, most notably those that involved working closely with the local community through community mobilisation, benefitted from three main qualities embodied by the volunteers, these being their availability, flexibility and embeddedness within their own localities. The prior expertise of the implementing organisation in working with youth was another factor contributing to the programme outputs, as they possessed the social network and resources necessary to quickly train and mobilise the volunteers. The effectiveness of youth participation, which was measured not only through an examination of the programme results, but also through an assessment of how well the participatory activities managed to achieve the intended purposes of participation discussed in theoretical texts, revealed the possibility of youth participation in humanitarian responses to contribute to improving operational functions while still leading to self-empowerment and inner growth. The actual capacity of each organisation to include youth in their responses, however, is a defining factor in the methods in which youth may be able to use their inherent capabilities to contribute to the effectiveness of any operation.

Joint probability methods for assessing storm surge flood risk involve the use of a collection of hydrodynamic storm simulations to fit a response surface model describing the functional relationship between storm surge and storm parameters like central pressure deficit and the radius of maximum wind speed. However, in areas with a sufficiently low probability of flooding, few storms in the simulated storm suite may produce surge, with most storms leaving the location dry with zero flooding. Analysts could treat these zero-depth, “non-wetting” storms as either truncated or censored data. If non-wetting storms are excluded from the training set used to fit the storm surge response surface, the resulting suite of wetting storms may have too few observations to produce a good fit; in the worst case, the model may no longer be identifiable. If non-wetting storms are censored using a constant value, this could skew the response surface fit. The problem is that non-wetting storms are indistinguishable, but some storms may have been closer to wetting than others for a given location. To address these issues, this thesis proposes the concept of a negative surge, or “pseudo-surge”, value with the intent to describe how close a storm came to causing surge at a location. Optimal pseudo-surge values are determined by their ability to improve the predictive performance of the response surface via minimization of a modified least squares error function. We compare flood depth exceedance estimates generated with and without pseudo-surge to determine the value of perfect information. Though not uniformly reducing flood depth exceedance estimate bias, pseudo-surge values do make improvements for some regions where <40% of simulated storms produced wetting. Furthermore, pseudo-surge values show potential to replace a post-processing heuristic implemented in the state-of-the-art response surface methodology that corrects flood depth exceedance estimates for locations where very few storms cause wetting.

A fragility function quantifies the probability that a structural system reaches an undesirable limit state, conditioned on the occurrence of a hazard of prescribed intensity level. Multiple sources of uncertainty are present when estimating fragility functions, e.g., record-to-record variation, uncertain material and geometric properties, model assumptions, adopted methodologies, and scarce data to characterize the hazard. Advances in the last decades have provided considerable research about parameter selection, hazard characteristics and multiple methodology for the computation of these functions. However, there is no clear path on the type of methodologies and data to ensure that accurate fragility functions can be computed in an efficient manner. Fragility functions are influenced by the selection of a methodology and the data to be analyzed. Each selection may lead to different levels of accuracy, due to either increased potential for bias or the rate of convergence of the fragility functions as more data is used. To overcome this difficulty, it is necessary to evaluate the level of agreement between different statistical models and the available data as well as to exploit the information provided by each piece of available data. By doing this, it is possible to accomplish more accurate fragility functions with less uncertainty while enabling faster and widespread analysis. In this dissertation, two methodologies are developed to address the aforementioned challenges. The first methodology provides a way to quantify uncertainty and perform statistical model selection to compute seismic fragility functions. This outcome is achieved by implementing a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework in conjunction with a sequential Monte Carlo technique. Using a finite amount of simulations, the stochastic map between the hazard level and the structural response is constructed using Bayesian inference. The Bayesian approach allows for the quantification of the epistemic uncertainty induced by the limited number of simulations. The most probable model is then selected using Bayesian model selection and validated through multiple metrics such as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The subsequent methodology proposes a sequential selection strategy to choose the earthquake with characteristics that yield the largest reduction in uncertainty. Sequentially, the quantification of uncertainty is exploited to consecutively select the ground motion simulations that expedite learning and provides unbiased fragility functions with fewer simulations. Lastly, some examples of practices during the computation of fragility functions that results i n undesirable bias in the results are discussed. The methodologies are implemented on a widely studied twenty-story steel nonlinear benchmark building model and employ a set of realistic synthetic ground motions obtained from earthquake scenarios in California. Further analysis of this case study demonstrates the superior performance when using a lognormal probability distribution compared to other models considered. It is concluded by demonstrating that the methodologies developed in this dissertation can yield lower levels of uncertainty than traditional sampling techniques using the same number of simulations. The methodologies developed in this dissertation enable reliable and efficient structural assessment, by means of fragility functions, for civil infrastructure, especially for time-critical applications such as post-disaster evaluation. Additionally, this research empowers implementation by being transferable, facilitating such analysis at community level and for other critical infrastructure systems (e.g., transportation, communication, energy, water, security) and their interdependencies.

<div>Ensuring the resilience of a state’s transportation network is necessary to guarantee an acceptable quality of life for the people the network serves. A lack of resilience in the wake of a seismic event directly impacts the states’ overall safety and economic vitality. With the recent identification of the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone (WBSV), Department of Transportations (DOTs) like Indiana’s have increased awareness for the vulnerability of their bridge network. The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) has been steadily working to reduce the seismic vulnerability of bridges in the state in particular in the southwest Vincennes District. In the corridor formed by I-69 built in the early 2000s the bridge design is required to consider seismic actions. However, with less recent bridges and those outside the Vincennes District being built without consideration for seismic effects, the potential for vulnerability exists. As such, the objective of this thesis is to develop a robust seismic vulnerability assessment methodology which can assess the overall vulnerability of Indiana’s critical bridge network. </div><div><br></div><div>A representative sample of structures in Indiana’s bridge inventory, which prioritized the higher seismic risk areas, covered the entire state geographically, and ensured robust superstructure details, was chosen. The sample was used to carry a deterministic seismic vulnerability assessment, applicable to all superstructure-substructure combinations. Analysis considerations, such as the calculation of critical capacity measures like moment-curvature and a pushover analysis, are leveraged to accurately account for non-linear effects like force redistribution. This effect is a result of non-simultaneous structural softening in multi-span bridges that maintain piers of varying heights and stiffnesses. These analysis components are incorporated into a dynamic analysis to allow for the more precise identification of vulnerable details in Indiana’s bridge inventory.</div><div><br></div><div>The results of this deterministic seismic assessment procedure are also leveraged to identify trends in the structural response of the sample set. These trends are used to identify limit state thresholds for the development of fragility functions. This conditional probabilistic representation of bridge damage is coupled with the probability of earthquake occurrence to predict the performance of the structure for a given return period. This probabilistic approach alongside a Monte Carlo simulation is applied to assess the vulnerability of linked bridges along key-access corridors throughout the state. With this robust seismic vulnerability methodology, DOTs will have the capability of identifying vulnerable corridors throughout the state allowing for the proactive prioritization of retrofits resulting in the improved seismic performance and resiliency of their transportation network.</div>

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第22256号 / 理博第4570号 / 新制||理||1656(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科地球惑星科学専攻 / (主査)准教授 西村 卓也, 教授 福田 洋一, 准教授 深畑 幸俊 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

Accounting for seismic forces and thermal expansion in bridge design requires an accurate passive force-deflection relationship for the abutment wall. Current design codes make no allowance for skew effects on passive force; however, large scale field tests indicate that there is a substantial reduction in peak passive force as skew angle increases. A reduction in passive force also reduces the transverse shear resistance on the abutment. The purpose of this study is to validate three-dimensional model using PLAXIS 3D, against large scale test results performed at Brigham Young University and to develop a set of calibrated finite element models. The model set could be used to evaluate the variation in passive resistance with skew angle for various abutment geometries and backfill types. Initially, the finite element model was calibrated using the results from a suite of field tests where the backfill material consisted of dense compacted sand. Results were available for skew angles of 0, 15, 30 and 45°. Numerical model results were compared with measured passive force-deflection curves, ground surface heave and displacement contours, longitudinal displacements, and failure plane geometry. Soil properties were defined by laboratory testing and in-situ direct shear tests on the compacted fill. Soil properties and mesh geometries were primarily calibrated based on the zero skew test results. The results were particularly sensitive to the soil friction angle, wall friction angle, angle of dilatancy, soil stiffness and lateral restraint of the abutment backwall movement. Reasonable agreement between measured and computed response was obtained in all cases confirming numerically that passive force decreases as skew angle increases Additional analyses were then performed for abutments with different soil boundaries.