Resilience by Design: Bringing Science to Policy Makers

Abstract

No one questions that Los Angeles has an earthquake problem. The “Big Bend” of the San Andreas fault in southern California complicates the plate boundary between the North American and Pacific plates, creating a convergent component to the primarily transform boundary. The Southern California Earthquake Center Community Fault Model has over 150 fault segments, each capable of generating a damaging earthquake, in an area with more than 23 million residents (Fig. 1). A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) analysis of the expected losses from all future earthquakes in the National Seismic Hazard Maps (Petersen et al. , 2014) predicts an annual average of more than $3 billion per year in the eight counties of southern California, with half of those losses in Los Angeles County alone (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2008). According to Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, Los Angeles faces one of the greatest risks of catastrophic losses from earthquakes of any city in the world, eclipsed only by Tokyo, Jakarta, and Manila (Swiss Re, 2013). Figure 1. Perspective view of fault segments in the Southern California Community Fault Model and seismicity 1984–2004 (fig. 1 from Plesch et al. , 2007). The last large earthquake in Los Angeles, the M w 6.7, 17 January 1994, Northridge earthquake happened the day before abstracts were due for the last meeting of the Seismological Society of America held in Pasadena. It took 45 min to get the first estimate of location and magnitude (“about 6 and a half in the northwest San Fernando Valley”) and 2 hr to locate the first aftershock, a failing of the computer systems that eventually led to the development of TriNet and the first broadband network in the United States (Hauksson et al. , 2001). When FedEx delivered more than 400 abstracts for that meeting, most of the …