Visual Damage Interpretation of Buildings in Bam City Using QuickBird Images Following the 2003 Bam, Iran, Earthquake Fumio Yamazaki, a… M.EERI, Yoshihisa Yano, b… and Masashi Matsuoka, c… M.EERI A strong earthquake struck the city of Bam in southeast Iran on 26 December 2003. The earthquake brought massive destruction to the city and its surrounding rural areas. QuickBird, a high-resolution satellite, captured a clear image of Bam on 03 January 2004, eight days after the event. The city was also observed by QuickBird on 30 September 2003, about three months before the event. In this paper, using the pre-event image, the location of individual buildings was registered on GIS and the city blocks surrounded by major roads were assigned. Then, the visual damage interpretation based on the European Macroseismic Scale EMS-98 was carried out building by building, comparing the pre-event and post-event images. The result of the damage inspection was compared with field survey data, and the accuracy and usefulness of the high-resolution satellite images in damage detection was demonstrated. DOI: 10.1193/1.2101807 INTRODUCTION It is quite important for emergency management and recovery works to capture dam- age distribution immediately after the occurrence of natural disasters, e.g., earthquakes or floods. In order to examine the applicability of remote sensing technologies to emer- gency management after earthquakes, the present authors performed visual damage de- tection using aerial video images and aerial photographs for the 1995 Kobe earthquake Hasegawa et al. 2000. These kinds of aerial images can identify the damage status of individual buildings, but they cannot cover a wide area with one acquisition time. On the other hand, satellite images have the advantage of being capable of observing a large area at one time. However, the spatial resolution of conventional satellite images e.g., Landsat, SPOT, ERS/SAR is from 20m to 30m. Hence, it is difficult to identify the damage of individual buildings and bridges from these images. Ikonos, the first commercial high-resolution satellite with maximum spatial resolu- tion of 1.0 m, launched successfully on 25 September 1999. It captured a clear image of a Professor, Department of Urban Environment Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University, 1-33Yayoi- cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan b Graduate Student, Department of Urban Environment Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University, 1-33Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan c Team Leader, Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Research Center, NIED, 1-5-2 Kaigandori,Wakinohama, Chuo- ku, Kobe 651-0073, Japan S329 Earthquake Spectra, Volume 21, No. S1, pages S329–S336, December 2005; © 2005, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute