The Earthquake Fatality Load and Capacity by Country: Measures of Impact
Description:
We propose two new quantitative measures of the impact on a country by fatal earthquakes. (1) The earthquake load in a country is the ratio of fatalities to population size, in units of fatalities per person over a given period in recent history. It measures the level of suffering by the population in seismically active countries, that is, it indicates the average annual cost in lives. The list of this new parameter in countries with adequate data for this estimate is lead in severity by Ecuador, Iran, Peru, Turkey and Chile considering the last five centuries. (2) The earthquake potency for a country, defined as the sum of recorded fatalities divided by the number of earthquakes that it took to accumulate them, equals the average earthquake disaster size in a given country, in units of fatalities per event. For calculating these two parameters, we have compiled a new catalogue of earthquake fatalities for the world, covering the period 856BC to March 2022, listing 2,795 reports. 117 countries have reported at least one earthquake with one fatality or more; 77 and 52 countries have reported more than 100 and 1,000 earthquake fatalities, respectively. The total number of fatalities recorded is 8,336,526. We estimate that the reporting of fatal earthquakes is complete for events with more than 16 fatalities since 1927. Caution has to be exercised in estimating what earthquake disasters are in store for a given country because the 95 year period of high quality recording is about an order of magnitude shorter than return times of great earthquakes. For rescue purposes, it is important to realize that small earthquakes, M 5 ± 0.5, can cause significant numbers of fatalities.
Session: Advances in Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis and Applications [Poster]
Type: Poster
Date: 4/20/2023
Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)
Presenting Author: Max Wyss
Student Presenter: No
Invited Presentation:
Authors
Max Wyss Presenting Author Corresponding Author max@maxwyss.ch International Centre for Earth Simulation Foundation, Geneva |
Michel Speiser michel.speiser@icesfoundation.org International Centre for Earth Simulation Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland |
Stavros Tolis svtolis@geoseismic.gr International Centre for Earth Simulation Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland |
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The Earthquake Fatality Load and Capacity by Country: Measures of Impact
Category
General Session