A Brief History of Seismic Risk Assessment

Seismology and earthquake engineering have rich histories, perhaps due to the fact that earthquakes tend to affect almost everything around us — after all, one can take shelter from a storm, but not from an earthquake. Great minds — Aristotle, Plato, Da Vinci and Kant to name a few — have grappled with the problems of earthquakes. When issues of risk are added to those of earthquakes, the field and history are further enriched (think of adding Pascal, Fermat, Bernoulli, Keynes, etc.), and the challenge of writing a history increased commensurately. The task is daunting — Housner (1984) observed: “Earthquake engineering is a 20th Century development, so recent that it is yet premature to attempt to write its history ... Although 1984 is too soon to write a definitive history, it is an appropriate time for an historical view of earthquake engineering development to see where we were, where we now are, and where we are going...” This writer agreed entirely when he heard those words in 1984, but two more decades later the perspective is greatly improved, at least as regards seismic risk assessment. In fact, as we shall see, in many ways we were just on the verge of seismic risk analysis and assessment in 1984, whereas today we have very significant capabilities.