ECONOMIC RESILIENCE: LESSONS FROM THE ShakeOut EARTHQUAKE SCENARIO

Following a damaging earthquake, "business interruption" (BI) -- reduced production of goods and services-- begin and continue long after the ground shaking stops. Economic resilience reduces BI losses by making the best use of the resources available at a given point in time (static resilience) or by speeding recovery through repair and reconstruction (dynamic resilience). Economic resilience is an important concept to incorporate into economic loss modeling and recovery and contingency planning. Lessons learned about the elicitation, breadth, economic characteristics, and effectiveness of resilience strategies result from interactions between stakeholder resilience suggestions, our economic resilience framework, and our loss modeling for the USGS/CGS Magnitude 7.8 ShakeOut earthquake.

During numerous participatory meetings, Southern California stakeholders (businesses, emergency responders, local, regional, and state agencies, special districts) collectively proposed about eighty resilience strategies when presented with ShakeOut earthquake information, physical damages, and lifeline outages. The strategies are culled for repetition, and used to enhance and populate our economic resilience framework according to static and dynamic resilience, level of economic resilience (micro, meso, or macro), inherent or adaptive ability, and applicability to production inputs (capital, labor, materials, infrastructure) and outputs. For example, pooling scarce inputs of water and disinfection chemicals among water districts represents a static meso-level resilience strategy. The pooling strategy is inherent for water redistribution among interoperable systems and adaptive for chemical redistribution in the absence of prior arrangements to share chemicals. Obstacles to pooling chemicals include incompatible water systems, and damaged transportation networks.

Several resilience strategies are incorporated into the ShakeOut input-output analysis of BI losses. Results demonstrate eroded economic resilience from lengthy disruptions caused by fire-damaged buildings and water service outages, and less resilience in service sectors than manufacturing sectors. Resilience is a complement to mitigation (damage prevention) and may, in fact, have cost and all-hazards advantages.