Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Executive Summary An earthquake loss estunate is a forecast of the effects of a hy- pothetical earthquake. Depending on its purpose, a loss study may include estimates of deaths and injuries; property losses; loss of func- tion in industries, lifelines, and emergency facilities; homelessness; and economic impacts. This report focuses primarily on loss esti- mates of the type funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They apply to an urban area or region and are in- tended primarily for use by local and state governments for disaster response and mitigation planning and the formulation of near- and Tong-term strategies for earthquake hazard reduction. However, the same basic methods, and many of the techniques for carrying out portions of these basic methods, also apply to other types of loss estimates. Most loss estimates are made for one earthquake or a few earth- quakes, specified by magnitude and location. The result is one or more scenarios describing the consequences of the selected earth- quakets). While this is the most common result of a loss study, especially when the objective is disaster response planning, it is not necessarily the most meaningful type of result. When the objective is to select the best allocation of resources for hazard reduction, more information can be derived from a probabilistic risk analysis that considers losses from a spectrum of possible earthquakes, taking 1