M 7.9 Earthquake Reminder of Earthquake Risk Management

Saturday’s powerful M 7.9 earthquake in Papua New Guinea highlights the need for accurate accumulation analytics and scenario modeling to manage earthquake risk; and it is a potent reminder that the Ring of Fire, the arc of seismic faults around the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes are common, remains one of the most active earthquake regions globally.

During the December 17 – 18 period, the EigenAlert event response service provided subscribers with 13 notices of earthquakes greater than M 5.0 occurring in the Ring of Fire zone. While most were in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Micronesia, a M 6.4 event occurred in Peru on Sunday, near the Brazil border (60 miles southeast of the town of Esperanza). Fortunately, little to no damage has been reported from any of these events, but together, they highlight that

• up to date, accurate location information, combined with
• pre-event accumulation analyses, and
• scenario modeling

remain important tools in the risk management planning toolkit, providing insight and context to traditional probabilistic modeling.

Earthquake Risk Management

EigenPrism is a cloud-based service that transforms the workflow for risk analytics and modeling. Subscribers upload their exposure data into the platform, which acts as a data warehouse with built-in geovisualization and analytics tools. It is therefore very easy and quick to query the data, overlay historical or what-if event scenarios, and drill-down into the resulting risk metrics. It is fast, flexible and cost effective.

To assist with earthquake risk management, the EigenPrism event catalog contains more than 2,000 historical and planning event footprints as well as seismic hazard geospatial layers. Using the built-in exposure analytics tools, you can assess and visualize your earthquake exposure in minutes. Advanced users can also customize their own vulnerability assumptions (e.g., based on internal modeling) to create scenario loss estimates that reflect their view of risk.

Contact us today for a live demo.