Dr. Lucy Jones to Advise the City of Los Angeles on Earthquake Vulnerabilities

SAFRR has just entered a technical assistance agreement with the City of Los Angeles to create recommendations for approaches that could reduce future losses from earthquakes in the City of Los Angeles in four areas. These areas were identified in the ShakeOut Scenario (Jones et al., 2008) as areas of particular vulnerability with high social consequences for Los Angeles and are: 1) pre-1975 non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings; 2) pre-1997 soft-first-story buildings; 3) the water system infrastructure including its impact on firefighting capability; and 4) communications infrastructure.

In each area, the project will define the scope of the problem, engage stakeholders of Los Angeles to consider approaches to reducing the problem and develop policies, engage experts as necessary to address technical constraints to the possible approaches, and finally create recommendations for the Mayor of Los Angeles on what can be done to reduce the impacts of these vulnerabilities. To accomplish these goals, Dr. Lucy Jones will be spending three-quarters of her time in the next year on this project.