Development of fragility curves for the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake

We suggest a method for developing fragility curves for building damage and human-fatality losses caused by the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake in this study. The values of seismic intensity of different districts are better defined and the problems of unevenness of weight of data points in a rural or urban district when we calculate the building damage and human-fatality rates are resolved through the concept of "Iso-seismic Intensity and Equal Population Intervals". We compare the fragility curves of two studies (Tsai and Wu) based on the unit of administrative districts to verify the feasibility of the method. The PGA Indexbased building damage, totally collapsed, and human-fatality rates are particularly useful in real-time application for prediction and assessment of the number and distribution of earthquake losses in future earthquake events and reduce the casualties and building damage to a minimum.