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National Earthquake Resilience
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The United States will certainly be subject to damaging earthquakes in the future, and some of those earthquakes will occur in highly populated and vulnerable areas. Just as Hurricane Katrina tragically demonstrated for hurricane events, coping with moderate earthquakes is not a reliable indicator of preparedness for a major earthquake in a populated area. This report presents a roadmap for increasing our national resilience to earthquakes, including the infrequent—but inevitable— Katrina-like earthquake events. The United States has not experienced a great1 earthquake since 1964, when Alaska was struck by a magnitude-9.2 event, and the damage in Alaska was relatively light because of the sparse population. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the most recent truly devastating U.S. shock, because recent destructive earthquakes have been only moderate to strong in size. Consequently, a sense has developed that the country can cope effectively with the earthquake threat and is, in fact, “resilient.” However, coping with moderate events may not be a true indicator of preparedness for a great one. One means to understand the potential effects from major earthquakes is to use scenarios, where communities simulate the effects and responses to a specified earthquake. Analysis of the 2008 ShakeOut scenario in California (Jones et al., 2008), which involved more than 5,000
978-0-309-18677-3
NONE
Social Science
English
2011
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