ALBERT

Description: Estimating the size of future earthquake disasters by fatality numbers (Fat) is possible with a useful accuracy. Governments, first responders and the population in a seismically active region can be told whether they must be prepared for major, medium, or small numbers of earthquake fatalities. Most of the fatality calculations with the tool QLARM made within minutes after earthquakes worldwide have been correct within factors of 2 to 3, or better. We expect that estimates of future numbers of fatalities are also in this range of accuracy. We follow these steps. 1) We verify that QLARM fatality estimates are correct to better than a factor of 2 for historic earthquakes. 2) We identify an active fault segment, L(local), that has not ruptured recently, and that may break in one event. 3) We estimate the magnitude, M(local), from the known relationship between L and M. 4) We calculate the number of fatalities for a line rupture of L(local), with M(local) and the local attenuation determined in step (1). 5) The data on building stock quality is contained in the program. We have estimated future earthquake fatalities in the Himalaya, China, Kirghizstan, Greece, Italy, Haiti, Portugal, Algeria, Spain, and Morocco. We have found that some regions contain only short faults typically L ≤ 30 km, implying M ≤ 6.5 and resulting in Fat 〈 several hundreds. In regions with L ≈ 100 km and 300 km, respectively (M7+ and M8) ruptures result in several thousand and several tens of thousand fatalities, respectively.

Description: Based on our new catalogue of 2,795 fatal earthquake for the world, covering the period 856BC to March 2022 not including tsunami deaths, we estimate that the reporting of fatal earthquakes is complete for events with more than 16 fatalities since 1927. The total number of fatalities recorded is 8,336,526. 117 countries have reported at least one earthquake with one fatality or more. 77 and 52 countries have reported more than 100 and 1,000 earthquake fatalities, respectively. We introduce the earthquake potency for a country, defined as the sum of recorded fatalities divided by the number of earthquakes that it took to accumulate them, which equals the average earthquake disaster size in a given country, in units of fatalities per event. A key measure of the earthquake problem in a country is the ratio of fatalities to population size. We propose that the new parameter earthquake fatality load per year objectively measures the level of the population suffering in seismically active countries, that is, it indicates the average annual cost in lives. Ecuador, Iran, Peru, Turkey and Chile have experienced the greatest loads during the last five centuries. We suggest that in multi-hazard analyses the parameters potency and load could be introduced for floods, storms and other geohazards.