The United States will certainly be subject to damaging earthquakes in the future. Some of these earthquakes will occur in highly populated and vulnerable areas. Coping with moderate earthquakes is not a reliable indicator of preparedness for a major earthquake in a populated area. The recent, disastrous, magnitude-9 earthquake that struck northern Japan demonstrates the threat that earthquakes pose. Moreover, the cascading nature of impacts-the earthquake causing a tsunami, cutting electrical power supplies, and stopping the pumps needed to cool nuclear reactors-demonstrates the potential complexity of an earthquake disaster. Such compound disasters can strike any earthquake-prone populated area. National Earthquake Resilience presents a roadmap for increasing our national resilience to earthquakes. The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) is the multi-agency program mandated by Congress to undertake activities to reduce the effects of future earthquakes in the United States. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-the lead NEHRP agency-commissioned the National Research Council (NRC) to develop a roadmap for earthquake hazard and risk reduction in the United States that would be based on the goals and objectives for achieving national earthquake resilience described in the 2008 NEHRP Strategic Plan. National Earthquake Resilience does this by assessing the activities and costs that would be required for the nation to achieve earthquake resilience in 20 years. National Earthquake Resilience interprets resilience broadly to incorporate engineering/science (physical), social/economic (behavioral), and institutional (governing) dimensions. Resilience encompasses both pre-disaster preparedness activities and post-disaster response. In combination, these will enhance the robustness of communities in all earthquake-vulnerable regions of our nation so that they can function adequately following damaging earthquakes. While National Earthquake Resilience is written primarily for the NEHRP, it also speaks to a broader audience of policy makers, earth scientists, and emergency managers.

Earthquakes have caused massive death and destruction, and potentially damaging earthquakes are certain to occur in the future. Although earthquakes are uncontrollable, the losses they cause can be reduced by building structures that resist earthquake damage, matching land use to risk, developing emergency response plans, and other means. Since 1977, the federal government has had a research oriented program to reduce earthquake losses the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). This program has made significant contributions toward improving our understanding of earthquakes and strategies to reduce their impact. Implementing action based on this understanding, however, has been quite difficult. This chapter provides an introduction to earthquakes: a sum mary of the earthquake hazard across the United States, a review of the types of losses earthquakes cause, a discussion of why earthquakes are a congressional concern, and an introduction to mitigation actions taken prior to earthquakes that can reduce losses when they occur. The federal policy response to date, NEHRP is then described and reviewed. Finally, specific policy options for improving federal efforts to reduce future earthquake losses are presented.

Initial priorities for U.S. participation in the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, declared by the United Nations, are contained in this volume. It focuses on seven issues: hazard and risk assessment; awareness and education; mitigation; preparedness for emergency response; recovery and reconstruction; prediction and warning; learning from disasters; and U.S. participation internationally. The committee presents its philosophy of calls for broad public and private participation to reduce the toll of disasters.