Increasing the Resilience to Natural Hazards in Southern California

Southern California is at great risk for extreme catastrophic losses owing to numerous natural hazards, such as earthquakes, wildfires, floods, tsunamis, landslides and coastal changes, that occur in this area (fig. 1). Expected losses from these hazards are estimated to exceed $3 billion per year in the eight counties of southern California.

In southern California Natural hazards have devastating consequences, including

• loss of life and injury, replacement costs of buildings and infrastructure, loss of function of critical facilities, service and infrastructure outages, business interruption, loss of jobs, and a decrease in the quality of life.

Multiple natural hazards are commonplace and often overlap

• to create secondary hazards. For example, earthquakes can produce landslides and severe fires and heavy storms can produce debris flows. Every year since 2000, when the population of the eight
• counties of southern California was nearly 19.7 million people, an estimated 276,000 more people become at risk from primary and secondary natural hazards.

Decision makers require different types of information at a

• wide range of spatial and temporal scales. The decision-making environment is dynamic and therefore decision makers need to be able to access the most recent information derived from scientific investigations that account for human and natural forces of change.

Effective risk-reduction options depend on resources that

• are subject to budget constraints and on personal or organizational preferences for acceptable levels of risk; therefore, models and simulation studies are useful for quantifying options.

The study area of the project will span the urban areas of southern California, including the Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas, and will extend north to Santa Barbara, east to Lancaster and Palm Springs, and south to the Mexican border.

The Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project (MHDP), initiated by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2007, brings together multiple disciplines and partners to help communities in southern California reduce death and destruction from natural hazards. To help increase the resilience of communities to future natural hazards, the project combines the knowledge of geology, water resources, geography, and biology with sound economic, engineering, social science and geospatial information capabilities to Create a focal point to improve communication among scien-

• tists and disaster managers and community planners.

Plan USGS science projects with community partners. Inter-

• action with community partners will aid the USGS in understanding community needs, improve emergency-management decisions, and guide future USGS research.

Initiate or expand real-time hazard monitoring and warning

• systems.

Provide new and easy-to-access hazards data, information,

• assessments, and models for use by community decision makers and researchers.

Develop and improve new research products, tools, risk maps,

• and assessments. Combine geologic, hydrologic, geographic, and biologic hazard products with economic, engineering and social science research to improve emergency-management decisions.

Use the best of what is developed for the MHDP for southern

• California to build a robust Urban Hazards program for the Nation. Natural-hazard information is useful to community

decision makers in preparing risk-reduction strategies. To provide the best scientific information on natural hazards, the USGS will carry out research to increase the understanding of the framework of hazard possibilities, vulnerable environments, community response, and associated risk-reduction options. The vulnerable environment is in part created by humans, but natural elements such as the soils, geology, hydrology and ecology also make an environment vulnerable. The goal of the USGS activities is to provide an understanding of the relationships between human actions and environmental vulnerabilities to aid in making informed decisions about possible risk-reduction activities.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from U.S. Geological Survey. Published by the U.S. Geological Survey and, as a work of the United States government, in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.