The Regional Economic Impacts of a Tsunami Wave

The hazard to metropolitan Southern California posed by locally generated tsunamis has received considerably less study than the hazards posed by onshore earthquakes. This is likely to change. The mechanisms that generate tsunamis have received considerable study as have major tsunamis in the past two decades such as in Papua New Guinea in July 1998, the Indian Ocean in December 2004 (with about 250,000 deaths in 14 countries), and Tohoku, Japan, in May 2011 (followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster). As a result of this increasing scientific scrutiny, Southern California’s susceptibility to tsunami damage has only recently become understood.