There were many potential sources for error in this project:

• Implementation of EEWS: While the aim of this project was to find "most suitable locations" for potential on site EEWS, handpicking only a few of these "High Suitability" sites would not result in a good EEWS. EEWS benefit from redundancy, and the more redundant the system is the better it operates on nearly all levels. Ideally the best location for on-site EEWS in NVSD schools is every single school.
• Controversy Surrounding EEWS: While EEWS is currently being used around the world, there remains controversy around the magnitude estimation methods. EEWS attempt to estimate the final magnitude of an earthquake using the characteristics of the first few seconds of P-wave recordings, which some seismologists claim there is no theoretical physical basis for.
• Seismic Update Status Classification: For this classification I digitized data from the B.C Ministry of Education "Seismic Mitigation Program Progress Report". I did not choose to differentiate between schools that have already been upgraded and schools that are slated to be upgraded under the assumption that the hypothetical earthquake event will occur after the upgrades are finished - as I mentioned in my research, these upgrades can be very time consuming. I also did not differentiate between the structural integrities of the schools that were not upgraded due to time constraints. A more exhaustive model of the structural integrity of NVSD schools would greatly improve the accuracy of my model.
• Liquefaction Classification: The liquefaction classification was based entirely on density, which is not the only factor when deciding the liquefaction risk at a given point. Classification also greatly oversimplified the varying degrees of liquefaction hazard on the North Shore, including the subsurface "rotten rock" that may destabilize during an earthquake event.
• Emergency Response Route Classification: This classification assumes that distance from major emergency response routes will make emergency response increasingly difficult in a uniform fashion across the entire district. This is often not the case, as some schools near emergency response routes may be buried in a network of narrow or hard to navigate roads, while others further from emergency response routes may be easily accessible.
• Factor Weighting: My chosen factor weights were chosen as the result of my research, and may not be relevant to what the NVSD or B.C Ministry of Education wish to accomplish with an EEWS. I chose to focus on schools that could suffer great damage and be difficult for emergency response to get to, while there are many other perfectly acceptible models. You could cover a wide array of slope angles and soil types in order to best model the earthquake damage across the entirety of the shore, select key schools based on their relative distances from each other to create a network that covers the most amount of schools with the least amount of on-site EEWS, or a wide variety of other models.
• Other Factors: There are a large number of other factors I could have included in my model, but could not due to lack of data or time constraints. The possibilities for EEWS site suitability modeling are extensive, and it would be interesting to take some other factors into effect such as community earthquake preparednesss, population density, school population, proximity or density of above ground electrical wires, and many more.

 

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