An interactive online map is a new resource for homeowners and businesses in Nevada to gauge the potential for earthquake damage in their communities. Users can locate their home or business on the map and determine their proximity to faults.

“The overall message of the map is that there are lots of faults in Nevada and that we could have a major earthquake pretty much anywhere in the state,” said Jonathan Price, director and state geologist of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, the state geological survey and a research and public service unit of the University of Nevada.

Price said the map was a long-term effort that began with research geologist Craig dePolo’s dissertation work that was picked up by the U.S. Geological Survey and incorporated into its Quaternary Fault and Fold Database. The information then came back to the bureau for more work. The information shown on the map represents about 10 years of work. “Just getting a good fault map together has been quite the project,” Price said. “Putting it all online was something that we just did in the last few months.”

Price added that one of the map’s key features is that the faults are shown as swaths instead of narrow lines. Users won’t be able to determine if a fault runs under their home or business by using the map. But if they’re shown in the swath, then they know to take a closer look at their local geology. Price recommended that if home and business owners find that they are located in the map’s fault lines that they bring in an engineer or geology consultant to take a closer look at the area and determine exactly where the faults are.

Another tool the bureau recently released was a report, Estimated Losses From Earthquakes Near Nevada Communities, outlining the potential losses that earthquakes could inflict in 38 communities across the state — all of Nevada’s communities with more than 500 residents. The report used the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s HAZUS tool — a risk assessment methodology for analyzing potential losses from natural disasters — to estimate total economic loss, number of people needing public shelter and hospital care, and number of fatalities from earthquakes of Richter magnitude 5, 5.5, 6, 6.5 and 7, among other factors.

“That product is quite useful for emergency planning for the kinds of exercises that we do for emergency recovery and response planning,” Price said. “It’s also being used in our hazard mitigation planning efforts for the entire state, and it can be used after an earthquake to get a very quick reference as to, ‘Well, we just had an earthquake of say magnitude 6.5 close to Reno — what were the likely damages that we could have from that?’ And we could look that up very rapidly with the report that was just released.”

[Photo courtesy of Adam DuBrowa/FEMA.]