A new method estimates the impact of earthquakes on nations through deaths

A new metric that compares earthquake-related deaths to a country's population size finds that Ecuador, Lebanon, Haiti, Turkmenistan, Iran and Portugal experienced the greatest mortality impact in the past five centuries.

The new impact measure, presented in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America by Max Weiss and colleagues at the Earth Simulation Foundation's International Center, is called the Earthquake Fatal Load, or EQFL. The EQFL for a given earthquake is the ratio of deaths caused by the earthquake to the estimated population of the country in the year of the earthquake.

In their study, Wyss, Michel Speiser, and Stavros Tolis calculated the burden of deaths due to earthquakes in 35 countries and regions, by adding the calculated EQFL for earthquakes in these countries occurring within the past approximately 500 years, as well as the annual EQFL measurement for each country. This last measure was used to rank countries by the impact of earthquake deaths.

Together, the countries studied accounted for 97% of all earthquake-related deaths from 1500 to March 2022, Weiss said. The EQFL measurement excludes deaths related to tsunamis caused by earthquakes, Weiss said.

Although major earthquakes in places like California, Japan, and China often make headlines because of the size of their quakes or their damage to property, the goal of the EQFL scale is to show how the most significant impact of an earthquake — the loss of life — affects some people. countries more than others.

“We wanted to look at how risky it is for a country to absorb those losses,” he said. “When you do that quantitatively, the ranking of countries you worry about suddenly changes.”

The researchers found that small countries suffer more from earthquake deaths than larger countries, even when they are exposed to fewer deadly earthquakes, because the losses represent a larger percentage of their population.

They also noted that countries without large tectonic plate boundaries — the boundaries where some of Earth's largest earthquakes occur — and countries with slow deformation buildup rates on faults rank highly in the EQFL. For example, the last deadly earthquakes in Morocco and Afghanistan in 2023 occurred along faults that are slowly deforming.

Weiss and colleagues also calculated that the value of EQFL as a function of size has declined over time in all countries analysed. Over time, the authors noted, buildings became more resistant to shaking and countries became better at quickly sending aid to earthquake zones and rescuing people trapped under rubble.

Weiss noted that global trends showing more people moving from villages to cities could also contribute to a lower quality of life, as buildings in cities are more likely to be constructed using materials and designs that resist ground shaking and emergency response can be faster in the city. Compared to the city. Remote village.

California, and a group of countries consisting of Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, have seen the strongest declines in EQFL over the past 500 years. Italy had the smallest decline in EQFL, “older buildings are more likely to be preserved, renovated and lived in,” the BSSA authors note.

Weiss has long called for a greater focus on earthquake fatalities to identify and address the impact of earthquakes around the world. He and his colleagues developed QLARM (Quake Loss Assessment for Response and Mitigation), a service that uses population and building inventory datasets from around the world to produce a real-time accounting of deaths, injuries and damage to buildings caused by strong shaking in earthquakes. . In the United States, the USGS's PAGER (Rapid Global Earthquake Assessment for Response) tool provides a similar service.

People, not property, are the most important potential loss in an earthquake, said Viss, who added that the possibility of preventing deaths with QLARM is what keeps him working without a paycheck. “That's why I'm willing to get out of bed when there's an earthquake at night for the rest of my life — as long as I'm still smart to do it — for the people, not for the money.”

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