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I wonder how many here realize that the only social contract (between building engineers and the rest of us in North America) is that for the absolute majority of buildings (> 99.9% of building stock) under the scenario known as the maximum considered earthquake a building shall not collapse. Meaning that any damage beyond repair or any failure of structurally non-critical components that can possibly entail lives lost is acceptable.

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Do you disagree with that approach?

I live about 3 miles from a large fault line, and am OK with it - my concern is that my family does not get crushed when/if the predicted big earthquake hits. As long as that is true, I do accept that I will have a lot of repair work to do, and will lose some objects. I am not going to live my life pouring money into preserving material goods, or preserving all of my home, when I can spend that same money rebuilding, when/if that day comes.

Consider if the recovery might be thwarted by airports unable to accept arriving crews, hospitals and shelters without power and water, the fallout from a high tech hub taken out of operations for months etc. There's also the conundrum that -- because there's no metric in place to differentiate between structures that would perform vastly differently under a seismic event -- there's no rational way to estimate the damage. You may be at once overpaying and overvaluing your earthquake insurance. Your insurance has no way of reliably estimating its risks, which undermines its solvency, which unwittingly reduces its worth to the consumer. One might not be in a position to rebuild.

The issue is that our society at present does not single out life-critical operations and provide for them accordingly. The cost-benefit analysis has not been done.

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