The NMSZ Catastrophic Earthquake Disaster Response Planning Initiative involves partnerships and collaboration with hundreds of government agencies; business, industry and voluntary organizations; and scientific and academic institutions.
This collaborative planning is designed to identify high-risk areas, assess current disaster response capabilities, identify anticipated response shortfalls and develop comprehensive planning strategies in the eight NMSZ States. The emphasis is on building local and state capabilities that are integrated with federal capabilities.
NMSZ states include Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee. A catastrophic earthquake event in the NMSZ, which runs from west of Memphis, Tenn., through southern Illinois, physically would impact a much larger area than would similar earthquakes elsewhere in the country. This is due to the susceptibility of the NMSZ to soil liquefaction and the efficiency of the earth’s crust in the Central and Eastern U.S. to transmit earthquake ground shaking, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The largest earthquakes in history in the continental United States occurred along the NMSZ in the winter of 1811–1812, according to FEMA.
The Initiative
This initiative is part of FEMA’s Catastrophic Disaster Planning Initiative to conduct analyses and develop plans for mass evacuation, sheltering and response to catastrophic disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.
The initial phase uses scenario-driven workshops in the NMSZ states and local-level tabletop exercises. Workshop participants include operational and planning personnel from all levels of government and the private and academic sectors. State and local participants include emergency services coordinators, emergency management staff, county emergency managers, state and local law enforcement, fire and emergency medical personnel, public works and public health personnel.
FEMA Headquarters, four FEMA Regions, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the American Red Cross and more than 200 local governments are participating in the initiative.
FEMA embedded support planners in each of the four participating FEMA Regions and in each of the eight NMSZ states, to facilitate scenario-driven planning and identification of required resources based on a bottom-up, local approach. This helps ensure cross-jurisdictional and cross-discipline integration of plans, vertically and horizontally across all levels of government. The planners help the regions and states plan and execute the workshops, provide follow-up assistance to local jurisdictions in each state, and incorporate the outcomes of the planning workshops into each state’s earthquake plan.
In addition, earthquake response capability assessments have been completed for each of the eight NMSZ states and published in the recently released report Impact of Earthquakes on the Central USA. The assessments provided the basis for the scenarios used in the planning workshops.
The state workshops are designed to gather information for revising the states’ Catastrophic Event Annexes, developing Incident Action Plans for the first 72 hours following an event, and creating functional plans that can be executed soon after their development. While the states are responsible for establishing their own specific planning objectives, the overall goal is to establish a unified approach for responding that integrates the emergency management, private sector and critical infrastructure communities into a single, coordinated response structure that includes federal, state, local, tribal and other government entities, as well as the private sector.
Additional planning workshops are scheduled, including FEMA regional- and national-level workshops. A capstone workshop will involve the integration of all the plans developed through the scenario-based workshops.
For FEMA earthquake resources, visit Are You Ready? Earthquakes, Earthquake: How can I protect myself? and HAZUS-MH Earthquake Model.