*EPF313 02/06/2002
Emergency Preparedness Transcends National Boundaries
(Third in a series on APEC initiatives) (800)

By Nadine Leavitt Siak
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Consider the fact that the world's greatest earthquake belt -- where approximately 81 percent of the world's largest earthquakes occur -- is found along the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Then consider the fact the world's second most important earthquake belt includes a stretch extending from China through Indonesia. Together, these two dangerous seismic strips touch Chile, Mexico, the United States, Japan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand -- in other words, most of the members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

It is no wonder, then, that APEC members have made a public commitment to strengthen cooperative efforts for helping each other deal with natural disasters such as earthquakes. APEC leaders recognize that large-scale natural disasters that affect one economy can affect all in the APEC community, and that individual economies in the region can benefit from shared expertise and collaboration on emergency preparedness/mitigation activities.

One way in which APEC economies have tackled the problem of earthquake mitigation is by promoting research cooperation through sponsoring forums for discussion and technological information exchange. For example, experts from 11 APEC economies attended the 2001 APEC workshop on earthquake disaster mitigation in Taipei, Taiwan.

Joe Barr, an Australian emergency management expert, said he found the workshop to be especially useful because "in Australia, we tend to get most of our disaster management input from the North Atlantic axis, and some of the viewpoints from eastern Asia were both interesting and challenging." Barr said among the lessons he learned was the need to consider the impact of non-structural damage on the ability of hospitals and other public facilities to survive and perform their allocated roles after major earthquakes.

Dr. Carla Prater, a research at Texas A&M University working on a U.S. National Science Foundation project, said she also found the APEC workshop very helpful because she was able to gather supplementary material that will assist her in completing her team's research. "Several of the presentations filled in some background details that will help me explain the events I am studying," she said, and she met one researcher who has produced a database that will be very useful to her project.

"Such opportunities to meet with counterparts from other countries are
invaluable because they help us to verify our interpretations of data,
broaden our field of comparison, and establish links for future
collaborative research," Prater said.

Besides sponsoring information exchanges on mitigating the effects of earthquake, APEC also promotes collaboration on perfecting earthquake forecasting technologies -- i.e. based on scientific data, calculating the probability of a potential future earthquake in a specific area. The APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation project (ACES) is a cooperative research endeavor begun in 1999 with scientists from China, Japan, Australia and the United States. These APEC-member scientists have joined efforts in a collaborative international research project using high-performance computers to probe earthquake behavior. ACES aims to develop realistic supercomputer simulation models for the complete earthquake generation process, thus providing a powerful means to study the earthquake cycle -- and thus a new opportunity to gain an understanding of the earthquake process and precursory phenomena needed for improved forecasting.

APEC has coordinated an international effort linking complementary nationally based programs, centers and research teams. John Ruddle, an ACES-affiliated scientist who is also director of the Colorado Center for Chaos & Complexity at the University of Colorado, credits discussions and work done at an ACES conference for two recent, important developments in earthquake forecasting.

Ruddle said ACES conferences have provided a venue that has allowed ACES-affiliated researchers to further a "neurodynamic" model of earthquake activity -- a surprising model now getting physicist support that shows that the methods used to analyze the patterns of electrical signals in the brain can be applied to earthquakes. In other words, researchers suggest that the same basic mathematical equations underlie both types of systems -- brains and earthquakes.

In addition, Ruddle said, a new method of earthquake forecasting based on the application of quantum mechanics mathematics to earthquake patterns is growing from early work and discussions by ACES-affiliated researchers at the ACES conference held in Australia in 1999. Researchers at the University of Colorado and other ACES-affiliated research groups are currently collaborating one refining this mathematical approach that, Ruddle said, "We believe will form the basis for a practical earthquake forecasting method."

Such a collaborative success would be great news for people all over the world, but particularly APEC members -- for the world's largest recorded earthquake (magnitude 9.5) not only struck Chile in 1960, but was so powerful that it triggered a tsunami (powerful seismic ocean wave) that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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