The U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency
sponsored a workshop on, "Continuing Actions to Reduce Losses from Earthquakes
in the Mississippi Valley area," in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 24-26, 1982.
Seventy individuals (see Appendix A) representing local, State, and Federal
government; business and industry; and the research community participated in
the three day workshop. Collectively, the participants had backgrounds in
disaster preparedness, disaster response and recovery, geology, geophysics,
seismology, engineering, architecture, social science, law, insurance, and
land-use planning. Two-thirds of them came from the Mississippi Valley area
about one half of these had also attended an earlier USGS-FEMA workshop held
in Knoxville, Tennessee on September 16-18, 1981 (Hays, 1982).
The St. Louis workshop is the 18th in the continuing series of
conferences and workshops which the Geological Survey initiated in 1977 to
improve the transfer and application of research results throughout the
Nation. It is the second workshop to focus on dealing with the earthquake
threat in the Eastern United States. The first one, "Preparing for and
Responding to a Damaging Earthquake in the Eastern United States," was held in
Knoxville, Tennessee, and emphasized the development of a draft 5-year plan to
improve the state-of-earthquake-preparedness. The Knoxville workshop
demonstrated that policymakers and members of the scientific-technical
community can assimilate and synthesize a great deal of information and work
together to devise practical plans. The St. Louis workshop, a sequel to the
Knoxville workshop, identified those actions out of the range of possible
actions which are most achievable; that is, the actions having the highest
payoff and trre lowest cost and effort requirements. These action plans, which
identify steps that can be undertaken immediately to reduce losses from
earthquakes in each of the seven States in the Mississippi Valley area, are
contained in this report. The draft 5-year plan for the Central United
States, prepared in the Knoxville workshop, was the starting point of the
small group discussions in the St. Louis workshop which lead to the action
plans contained in this report. For completeness, the draft 5-year plan for
the Central United States is reproduced as Appendix B.
