Annualized Economic and Human Earthquake Losses for Mainland Portugal

Abstract eng:
Loss seismic scenarios are important tools for civil protection emergency planning. However, effective risk mitigation strategies should not be restricted to the evaluation of a single scenario event based on probabilistic or deterministic analysis. In practice, any future event will produce significant different effects from the assumed scenario. The aim of this paper is to give a hint on the order of magnitude of the risk associated to annual seismic losses in Portuguese Continental regions. The proposed solution is to evaluate statistical central value measures to describe seismic losses. In concrete, annualized risks will be averaged over a large period of time and two single parameters (see Results and Application) are chosen to quantify social and economic impacts due to earthquakes. The results are presented in terms of average annual economic and human losses, due to earthquakes, for the 278 Portuguese Continental counties. Portuguese main provinces are ranked according to those parameters. The dependence of average annual seismic risk on predictive variables, like hazard and vulnerability, is analyzed in detail. The geographic distribution of the annualized losses leads to the conclusion that the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon (MAL) is the Portuguese region with higher losses, due to its high exposure combined with moderate hazard, whereas Algarve is the region with higher specific human losses, due to its significant seismic hazard.

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