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The Kalgoorlie Earthquake of the 20th April 2010 : Preliminary Damage Survey Outcomes

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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The seismicity of the Australian continent is low to moderate by world standards. However, the seismic risk is much higher for some types of Australian infrastructure. The legacy of older unreinforced masonry buildings, in particular, may contribute disproportionately to community risk. At 8:17am on the 20th April a Mw 5.0 earthquake shook Kalgoorlie. The resultant ground motion was found to vary markedly across the town with the older masonry building stock in the suburb of Boulder experiencing a greater shaking intensity than the corresponding vintage of buildings in the Kalgoorlie business district 4km away. The event has provided the best opportunity to examine the earthquake vulnerability of Australian buildings since the Newcastle Earthquake of 1989. This paper describes the event and the staged collaborative survey activity that followed. The initial reconnaissance team of two specialists captured street-view imagery of 12,000 buildings within Kalgoorlie using a vehicle mounted camera array developed by Geoscience Australia. This information subsequently informed a systematic population based building survey using PDA data collection units. The work was performed by a team of nine from the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne and Geoscience Australia. This paper describes the preliminary findings of the work and outlines proposed future research.

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Field Value
Title The Kalgoorlie Earthquake of the 20th April 2010 : Preliminary Damage Survey Outcomes
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/74ea4ef2-9178-4a8b-88ba-019c492d379d
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 11/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage Australia
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "The Kalgoorlie Earthquake of the 20th April 2010 : Preliminary Damage Survey Outcomes". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/the-kalgoorlie-earthquake-of-the-20th-april-2010-preliminary-damage-survey-outcomes