The "BIG ONE" ...

The Great Southern California ShakeOut / Golden Guardian 2008

At 10 AM on November 13, 2008 millions of Southern Californians will participate in The Great Southern California ShakeOut ... the largest earthquake prepardness exercise in U.S. history.

Visit The Great Southern California ShakeOut web site for a schedule of events and to see how you can participate, click here...

The nation’s largest state sponsored emergency exercise will take place November 13-18. Golden Guardian 2008. This exercise will test California’s capability to respond and recover during a major catastrophic earthquake, to go to the CA OES Golden Guardian 2008 web site, click here...

Folks from all the CA HAZUS User Groups are participating in this exercise ... BAHUG, SoCalHUG, CAValleyHUG and the developing San Diego HUG ...

UPDATE:
Initial HAZUS Model Results (This was posted at about 3PM / Nov 13th on the CA Post Earthquake Information Clearinghouse web site: www.eqclearinghouse.org ):

Coordinated CA Governor's Office of Emergency Services HAZUS loss modeling combined with the USGS ShakeMap product indicates the following:

• Approximately 11,000 injuries with about 500 requiring hospital care
• Approximately 500 deaths.
• Over 40,000 people in need of shelter of 91,000 displaced households
• Capital stock losses of over 40,000 million $. This includes structural, non-structural, contents, and inventory damage.

Although loss modeling has significant uncertainties, these HAZUS estimates include significant improvements to the building inventory information and should be considered the authoritative results. HAZUS and ShakeMap based loss modeling can provide a quick assessment of potential damage and is especially useful in larger earthquakes where communications and observations from the field are limited. For example, economic losses associated with the 1994 Northridge earthquake took almost 3 years to compile.