Seismic vulnerability assessment in Ranau, Sabah, using two different models

Abstract

Sabah is prone to seismic activities due to its location, being geographically located near the boundaries of three major active tectonic plates; the Eurasian, India-Australia, and Philippine- Pacific plates. The 6.0 Mw earthquake that occurred in Ranau, Sabah, on 15 June 2015 which caused 18 casualties, all of them climbers of Mount Kinabalu, raised many issues, primarily the requirements for seismic vulnerability assessment for this region. This study employed frequency ratio (FR)-index of entropy (IoE) and a combination of (FR-IoE) with an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to map seismic vulnerability for Ranau, Sabah. The results showed that the success rate and prediction rate for the areas under the relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves were 0.853; 0.856 for the FR-IoE model and 0.863; 0.906 for (FR-IoE) AHP, respectively, with the highest performance achieved using the (FR-IoE) AHP model. The vulnerability maps produced were classified into five classes; very low, low, moderate, high, and very high seismic vulnerability. Seismic activities density ratio analysis performed on the final seismic vulnerability maps showed that high seismic activity density ratios were observed for high vulnerability zones with the values of 9.119 and 8.687 for FR-IoE and (FR-IoE) AHP models, respectively.