Earthquake Prediction and Disaster Preparedness: Interactive Analysis

Abstract

Recent studies in earthquake predictions, having time windows of several years and possibly down to several months, have led to a reformulation of the intertwined problems linking disaster preparedness with earthquake prediction. Given an earthquake prediction including a time window, magnitude, probability of false alarm, and geographic area, disaster managers and policy makers have to select an appropriate set of temporal preparedness measures to implement taking into account the prediction uncertainties. The predictor has certain freedom to choose appropriate trade-offs between different kinds of prediction errors to allow for adequate preparedness decisions to be made. Both problems belong to the broad field of decision making based on incomplete information regarding action costs, damage prevented, gains achieved, and the prediction uncertainty. A hypothetical water supply system is used to demonstrate how infrastructure owners, disaster managers, and policy makers can utilize earthquake predictions to prevent considerable damage by undertaking appropriate preparedness measures. The problem of jointly optimizing earthquake prediction and disaster preparedness is also briefly considered by taking advantage of the fact that the prediction algorithm designer has certain limited freedom to choose between the rate of false alarms and failures to predict, giving the disaster manager options to use different algorithm versions depending on specific situations within the area of alarm.