Recovering From Earthquakes

Great natural disasters are rare, but their aftermath can change the fortunes of a city or region forever. This book and its companion Policy Focus Report identify lessons from different parts of the world to help communities and government leaders better organize for recovery after future disasters. The authors consider the processes and outcomes of community recovery and reconstruction following major disasters in six countries: China, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Post-disaster reconstruction offers opportunities to improve construction and design standards, renew infrastructure, create new land use arrangements, reinvent economies, and improve governance. If done well, reconstruction can help break the cycle of disaster-related impacts and losses, and improve the resilience of a city or region.

Earthquakes come without warming, and often cause massive devastation, resulting not only in the loss of property but also of lives. Many of the survivors suffer from intense and lasting psychological trauma. This book covers the experience of recent earthquakes in India, and what has been learnt (and what we have failed to learn) in the process of managing the aftermath in each case. This includes immediate medical attention, long-term mental health care, and the reconstruction of housing and infrastructure in both rural and urban areas. The experiences of the contributors, many of whom have actively contributed their expertise to disaster management and recovery, help us understand what problems require a swift response and which aspects should be based on detailed analyses keeping in mind local conditions. Reconstruction is seen as offering an opportunity to rebuild society such that all sections of the population are empowered and brought into the community’s decision-making process. It is also an opportunity to develop construction techniques that are suited to local materials and skills but are also more earthquake-resistant than the old. And finally, there is the realisation that the best first responders are local community groups which need to be nurtured, and trained in crisis management and risk mitigation.

Damage assessment, rehabilitation, decision-making, social consequences, repair and reconstruction; these are all critical factors for considerations following natural disasters such as earthquakes. In order to address these issues, the United States of America and the Peoples Republic of China regularly organize bilateral symposia/workshops to investigate multiple hazard mitigation, particularly with respect to earthquake engineering. This book contains state-of-the-art reports presented by world-renowned researchers at the US/PRC Sympsosium Workshop on Post-Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction held in Kunming, Yunnan, China, May 1995. The following key areas are addressed: damage assessment of structures after earthquakes; lessons of post-earthquake recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction, including public policy, land use options, urban planning, and design; issues in and examples of decision-making, and implementation of rehabilitation and reconstruction plans and policies; repair, strengthening, retrofit and control of structures and lifeline systems, post-earthquake socio-economic problems covering issues of relief and recovery; human and organizational behavior during emergency response, and strategies for improvement; real-time monitoring of earthquake response and damage.

The United States will certainly be subject to damaging earthquakes in the future. Some of these earthquakes will occur in highly populated and vulnerable areas. Coping with moderate earthquakes is not a reliable indicator of preparedness for a major earthquake in a populated area. The recent, disastrous, magnitude-9 earthquake that struck northern Japan demonstrates the threat that earthquakes pose. Moreover, the cascading nature of impacts-the earthquake causing a tsunami, cutting electrical power supplies, and stopping the pumps needed to cool nuclear reactors-demonstrates the potential complexity of an earthquake disaster. Such compound disasters can strike any earthquake-prone populated area. National Earthquake Resilience presents a roadmap for increasing our national resilience to earthquakes. The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) is the multi-agency program mandated by Congress to undertake activities to reduce the effects of future earthquakes in the United States. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-the lead NEHRP agency-commissioned the National Research Council (NRC) to develop a roadmap for earthquake hazard and risk reduction in the United States that would be based on the goals and objectives for achieving national earthquake resilience described in the 2008 NEHRP Strategic Plan. National Earthquake Resilience does this by assessing the activities and costs that would be required for the nation to achieve earthquake resilience in 20 years. National Earthquake Resilience interprets resilience broadly to incorporate engineering/science (physical), social/economic (behavioral), and institutional (governing) dimensions. Resilience encompasses both pre-disaster preparedness activities and post-disaster response. In combination, these will enhance the robustness of communities in all earthquake-vulnerable regions of our nation so that they can function adequately following damaging earthquakes. While National Earthquake Resilience is written primarily for the NEHRP, it also speaks to a broader audience of policy makers, earth scientists, and emergency managers.

Improved Seismic Monitoringâ€"Improved Decision-Making, describes and assesses the varied economic benefits potentially derived from modernizing and expanding seismic monitoring activities in the United States. These benefits include more effective loss avoidance regulations and strategies, improved understanding of earthquake processes, better engineering design, more effective hazard mitigation strategies, and improved emergency response and recovery. The economic principles that must be applied to determine potential benefits are reviewed and the report concludes that although there is insufficient information available at present to fully quantify all the potential benefits, the annual dollar costs for improved seismic monitoring are in the tens of millions and the potential annual dollar benefits are in the hundreds of millions.

Since the publication of the successful first edition of Earthquake Protection there have been 110 lethal earthquakes, killing 130 000 people; there have also been significant developments in the field of earthquake risk management, particularly in the modelling and analysis of risk for insurance and financial services. Furthermore, major earthquake disasters, such as the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan and the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake in Turkey have occurred. The experience and knowledge gained through these events have improved our understanding of how to manage, mitigate and work towards the prevention of similar catastrophes. The 1990s were in fact the costliest decade on record in terms of disaster management due to such seismic events, placing unprecedented pressure on the insurance industry in particular, and changing its view of earthquake protection. Significantly revised and updated, this second edition continues to provide a comprehensive overview of how to reduce the impact of earthquakes on people and property, and implement best practice in managing the consequences of such disasters. It also includes significant coverage of the techniques of modelling earthquake catastrophe. Each chapter deals with a separate aspect of protection, and covers a wide range of economic and social conditions, drawing on the authors' considerable personal experience and with reference to real life examples. Key features include: Recent event coverage Modern developments in the theory and practice of planning and engineering loss estimation techniques, along with new engineering techniques such as microzonation and hazard-mapping Historic buildings experience An entirely new chapter on 'Earthquakes and Finance' This valuable book provides essential reading for earthquake and structural engineers and geoscientists, as well as insurers and loss prevention specialists, risk managers and assessors involved in managing earthquake risk, urban and regional planners, and emergency management agencies.

Describes the rescue efforts involved in saving the lives of animals affected by an earthquake, including puppies, farm animals, and pandas.

Post-earthquake recovery and reconstruction can take years or decades after the earthquake itself. This long recovery time is often caused by the shortage of reconstruction resources, such as skilled labor or financing, which impedes the recovery process. Thus, decision-makers and stakeholders, such as local governments and private entities, must decide how the recovery process should proceed while accounting for the limited resources available. Computer simulations and models have been useful for better understanding the recovery process after earthquakes. However, few models have accounted for limited available resources. Therefore, new recovery models and algorithms that decision-makers can use to develop effective post-earthquake recovery strategies are presented here. First, this dissertation introduces a recovery model utilizing queuing theory to simulate the reconstruction time of residential buildings. This stochastic queuing model explicitly accounts for the total number of damaged buildings, the damage distribution, the limited number of reconstruction resources, and the prioritization strategy implemented by the decision-makers. As a result, the model better captures the delays in the post-earthquake recovery process. Long-term data collected after the 2018 Lombok, Indonesia earthquakes were used to calibrate and validate the model, and the results show how the stochastic queuing approach achieves higher accuracy than commonly used recovery frameworks, such as FEMA's HAZUS. Second, this dissertation presents an agent-based model for post-earthquake financing, another critical resource needed for post-earthquake reconstruction. The model incorporates funding from seven different US sources for single-family, owner-occupied homes and demonstrates how different income groups have differing access to these financing sources. A case study of the city of San Jose, California, USA, following a hypothetical M7.0 earthquake, shows that current post-earthquake financing and reconstruction policies in place can result in extreme disparities in recovery outcomes between different income groups. Based on these results, interventions that includes federal funding reforms and a redistribution of labor is presented and evaluated here. The results show how these interventions are necessary to reduce inequalities in recovery outcomes. Last, this dissertation proposes a greedy algorithm to determine the optimal reconstruction of critical buildings, particularly school buildings and healthcare facilities. The algorithm chooses the reconstruction order of damaged buildings that results in the best improvement of a chosen metric. For school buildings, the greedy algorithm minimizes the distances the students would have to travel to the nearest functional school, while also considering the number of times the students would have to transfer and the student-to-classroom ratio. In the case of healthcare facilities, the greedy algorithm minimizes the total time it takes for patients to receive medical care. Case studies of Lombok, Indonesia, and Lima, Peru for, respectively, school buildings and healthcare facilities, demonstrate that the greedy algorithm can achieve better recovery outcomes than currently used reconstruction strategies, such as the common practice of first reconstructing buildings with minor damage. The models and algorithms developed in this dissertation can be leveraged by researchers and decision-makers alike. In addition to providing a better understanding of the long-term effects of earthquakes, both physical and social, the work presented here contributes to the development of effective post-earthquake strategies and policies to reduce post-earthquake inequalities, reduce long-term effects on the community, and ultimately reduce the loss of lives after an earthquake.

Natural disasters have long been seen as naturally generated events, but as scientific, technological, and social knowledge of disasters has become more sophisticated, the part that people and systems play in disaster events has become more apparent. Production of Disaster and Recovery in Post-Earthquake Haiti demonstrates how social processes impact disasters as they unfold, through the distribution of power and resources, the use of discourses and images of disaster, and the economic and social systems and relations which underlie affected communities. The authors show how these processes played out in post-earthquake Haiti to set in motion the mechanics of the disaster industrial complex to (re)produce disasters and recovery rather than bring sustainable change. The book reveals that disaster and recovery rhetoric helped create fertile conditions for neoliberal disaster governance, militarized and digital humanitarianism, non-profiteering, and disaster opportunism to flourish while further disenfranchising marginalized populations. However, the Haiti earthquake, as is the case with all disaster sites, was ripe with mutual aid, community building, and collective action, all of which further local resilience. The authors seek to re-construct dominant discourses, policies, and practices to advance equitable, participatory partnerships with local community actors and propose a praxis for a people’s recovery as an action-oriented framework for resisting the transnational disaster industrial machinery. The authors argue for new synergies in policymaking and program development that can respond to emergencies and plan for true long-term, sustainable development after disasters that focuses as much on humans and the natural world as it does on economic progress. Production of Disaster and Recovery in Post-Earthquake Haiti will be of great interest to students and scholars of disaster studies, humanitarian studies, development studies, Haitian studies, geography and environmental studies, as well as to non-governmental organizations, humanitarians, and policymakers.