A revised (PTVA) model for assessing the vulnerability of buildings to tsunami damage

The Papathoma Tsunami Vulnerability Assessment (PTVA) Model (Papathoma, 2003) was developed in the absence of robust, well-constructed and validated building fragility models for assessing the vulnerability of buildings to tsunami. It has proven to be a useful tool for providing assessments of building vulnerability. We present an enhanced version (PTVA-3) of the model that takes account of new understanding of the factors that influence building vulnerability and significantly, introduce the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weighting the various attributes in order to limit concerns about subjective ranking of attributes in the original model. We successfully test PTVA-3 using building data from Maroubra, Sydney, Australia.