SCEC INSTANeT News
	SCEC Response to FEMA Earthquake Risk Report

By Thomas L. Henyey, Director, SCEC   The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a milestone national earthquake risk report on Wednesday, September 17, 2000, at a national seismic hazards conference in Seattle, Washington. The report presents Annualized Earthquake Loss (AEL) estimations for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, and in 35 metropolitan areas of the U.S. This new study estimates that the Annualized Earthquake Loss to the nation's building stock is $4.4 billion per year. The estimated losses are in two categories: 1) capital losses ($3.5 billion), which include repair and replacement costs for structural and nonstructural components, building content loss, and business inventory loss; and 2) income losses ($0.9 billion), which include business interruption, wage, and rental income losses. Of particular interest is that the majority (84%) of the average annual loss is located on the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington), with 74 percent ($3.3 billion per year) concentrated in the state of California and 25 percent in the County of Los Angeles alone. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) has long known about the seismic risk to southern California. The Center was founded in 1991 with a grant from the National Science Foundation to improve our understanding of the earthquake hazard through basic research. The high concentration of estimated loss in California is consistent with the state's high seismic hazard (active faults and earthquakes), large population density and expansive built environment (including many vulnerable structures). However, it is important to recognize that earthquake hazard is high in many other parts of the U.S. as well. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Salt Lake City have active fault systems capable of generating earthquakes every bit as damaging as those in southern California. The New Madrid seismic zone in the central U.S. produced, in 1811 and 1812, three of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in our nation's short history. So while we must not overlook the risk in these other parts of the country, it is essential that we address the risk in southern California through the following actions: implementing aggressive retrofit programs for vulnerable buildings and structures, initiating a statewide nonstructural mitigation program for schools, maintaining a strong earthquake science and engineering research effort through continuing support to organizations such as SCEC, the USGS, the California Universities for Earthquake Engineering (CUREe), and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Center (PEER), and continuing development of immediate response tools such as ShakeMap from TriNet to aid city and county emergency response teams in a post-earthquake setting. Distribution of Average Annualized Earthquake Loss by Region. (Figure 3-5 from the FEMA report, "HAZUS 99 Estimated Annualized Earthquake Losses for the United States." The full report is available for download as a PDF at the link above.)

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