Fire-following 7.8 quake in Southern California would cause $87 billion in losses

Fire following a theoretical 7.8 earthquake in Southern California would cause $65 billion in property damage and $22 billion in business interruption losses, Keith Porter, associate research professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told delegates of the National Insurance Conference of Canada (NICC) on Sept. 27.
Porter described the ShakeOut exercise that takes place on an annual basis in Southern California. In the exercise, experts ‘run’ a model of a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake – similar in scale to the one that’s overdue to hit the region – and analyze the fallout.
A quake of that magnitude would cause widespread damage to water supply pipelines and equipment, potentially impairing water supply for up to six months within 10 miles of the fault line.
“In much of the rest of the study areas, half of customers could lose water supply for up to a week.”
At the same time, buildings’ fire resistant qualities would be damaged, he continued. “Experts found it would be realistic that the ShakeOut event, if it were to actually happen, would produce 1,600 ignitions large enough for a fire engine to respond,” Porter said. “One-thousand-two-hundred of those would exceed the capability of the first engine to respond to put out the fire. We don’t have 1,200 fire engines in Southern California.”
The result would be 200-million-square-feet of buildings burnt, the equivalent of 133,000 single-family dwellings. Roughly $65 billion and $22 billion in business interruption would result.
“This is not the worst case scenario,” said Porter. We are assuming the Santa Ana winds are not blowing.”