Chilean Earthquake Risk Management

Risk management of natural hazards is the attempt to prevent unnecessary deaths and destruction due to a natural phenomenon such an earthquake. This natural phenomenon is extremely (nearly impossible) to predict when they will happen however by looking at plate movements and boundaries as well as historical events an understanding can be grasped to the whereabouts of these natural hazards, therefore risk management strategies can be put in place to try and prevent death and destruction.

As stated by Holden (2005), the Earth’s lithosphere is divided into a series of rigid plates and the boundaries of these plates is where most of the world’s earthquakes happen. As seen in Figure 1 the plates are ‘delineated by the distribution of earthquakes’

This is the probability of how frequently a certain magnitude earthquake is going to occur as shown in Table 1. Looking at the table it can be expected that only 1 ‘great’ earthquake a year (which is an earthquake measuring over 8 on the Richter scale) may occur, however these statistics are not deterministic. The Richter scale measures the amount of energy released by an earthquake called its magnitude as stated by Strahler & Strahler (1996). The scales maximum magnitude is 10 and it was said by Plummer and McGeary (1996), that earthquakes that are very small can even have a negative magnitude however these are extremely

According to (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ , 2012) the death toll was only 1655 people and cost to the country was only around $550million. Because of the area the earthquake hit, it did not cause as much damage or kill as many people as earthquakes which have been substantially less powerful. For example the Haiti earthquake measured only 7 on the Richter scale which is about a 500th of the size of the 1960s Chilean earthquake according to (http://theweek.com/ , 2010). However this earthquake caused a lot more damage. According to official estimates from (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ , 2012), ‘316,000 people killed, 300,000 injured, 1.3 million displaced and 97,294 houses destroyed’. It is also estimated that damage costs where in excess of 11billion according to (http://news.bbc.co.uk , 2014). This brings into question the risk management strategies in places like Haiti. Haiti was not an area unknown to earthquakes before 2010 in fact they had previously had earthquakes which were more powerful than the 2010 disaster. For example in 1946 they had an earthquake which measured 8 on the Richter scale but caused only 100 deaths according to (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ , 2012). So why was the 2010 earthquake so