Quantifying Business Interruption, Downtime, and Recovery following the 2014 South Napa Earthquake and Identifying the Causes

By I. Almufti, S. Fatima, C. Kroll, M. Mieler, H. Tremayne, A. Wein, Y. Xiao.

2016. Structural Engineers Association of California (SEAOC).

The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF), titled “Seismic Observatory for Community Resilience”, to identify a framework that could observe and measure resilience after future earthquakes. EERI’s Resilience Panel was tasked with fundamentally altering its Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) program to satisfy this objective. Following the 2014 South Napa Earthquake in California, a sub-committee of the EERI Resilience Panel convened a small team of additional researchers who developed a survey tool which can be used by reconnaissance teams, business groups, policy makers, and researchers to track business impacts and recovery after future earthquakes

This paper describes the development of the survey, the results of a pilot effort to launch the survey, and the implications for a longer term effort to consistently track impacts of earthquakes over time to measure resilience. The following section puts this survey development effort in the context of earlier research on business impacts of disasters. The next section briefly describes the survey development process, including some of the major challenges of developing a multipurpose, cross disciplinary set of questions. The following two sections concentrate specifically on the Napa event, the first describing the macrolevel impacts to Napa’s economy and business community, the second describing the survey launching and some preliminary results, focusing on three illustrative case studies. The concluding section evaluates the results of the survey pilot, giving implications for the design of a generic data collection effort across events and across time for a single event, as well as some of the highlights of the Napa pilot survey findings. Since the survey was only completed almost two years after the Napa earthquake the team did not deploy the first part of the survey (which recorded detailed building damage). In addition, due to the delay and because the impacts in Napa were relatively minor as compared to the Christchurch earthquake, the number of responses was limited. Current efforts are being undertaken in conjunction with the Mayor’s office to increase business participation.