Seismic and Landslide Hazards

SIG's consultants have designed state-of-the-art GIS tools to analyze seismic-related hazards. For a tour of a recent project, click here. SIG provides a wide range of services related to mapping and analysis of seismic hazards:

• Analysis of earthquake induced land deformations, landsliding and liquefaction.
• Analysis of structural vulnerability and potential damage to buildings, infrastructure, and lifelines from seismic activity
• Mapping of seismic hazard sites at various scales and resolutions
• Designing interactive map servers on the web showing seismic and landslide hazards in relation to parcels or neighborhoods

Wildfire Hazard Mitigation

As more cities are building out into formerly undeveloped areas, fire in the urban-wildland interface is becoming an increasingly important issue. SIG consultants have extensive experience in fire ecology, fire mitigation, fire economics and fire hazard policy and have designed fire hazard mitigation tools that link powerful fire hazard assessment models with GIS software. For a tour of such a project, click here. SIG can design models that assess fire hazard and that are easy to update as new data comes in. SIG can also custom design fire hazard mitigation tools that help land managers balance fire hazard reduction with concerns such as: cost of treatment, aesthetic degradation, regulations and ecological health. Additionally, we can apply our knowledge of policy, ecology and economics to help municipal, county and regional government agencies come up with long-term policy and management strategies to deal with the problem of fire risk in the urban-wildland interface.

Flood Hazards

While flood maps are available from the US government for many parts of the country, parcel-based flood designation is still problematic. Many agencies still do manual overlays of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood maps with US Census Street maps. Because of the inaccuracy of address matching using census street maps, many properties within the 100-year floodplain are never designated and many properties outside it are erronesouly designated, leading to costly administrative appeals. SIG can use digital techniques to overlay the most up-to-date flood maps with actual parcel maps, giving an extremely accurate representation of what properties really are in the FEMA-designated 100-year flood plain. SIG can also use GIS to help floodplain managers to come up with creative solutions for flood hazard mitigation. Our knowledge of GIS, flood hazard policy, hydrology, economics and floodplain ecology allows us to propose flood mitigation strategies that are cost-effective, environmentally sound and fully compliant with regulations. Finally, SIG can work with local governments to design web servers that perform overlays automatically in order inform property owners of their floodplain designation.

Risk Assessment and Decision Management

SIG's suite of skills allows us to conduct analyses on a wide range of assessment and decision problems involving natural hazards:

• Optimal risk/earning/reinsurance strategy
• Expected volume of claims for a given seismic scenario
• Effectiveness of fire-fighting forces under different emergencies
• Layout of facilities to care for casualties
• Costs of recovery and expected loss in revenue, functional and financial loss and estimate of down time