WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Despite the remarkable advances in earthquake prediction and mitigation that have been made over the past 25 years, the risk to the United States still "remains unacceptably high," a prominent Cornell University engineer told a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing today (May 8).

Speaking before the subcommittee on basic research, part of the House Committee on Science, Thomas O'Rourke, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell, Ithaca, N.Y., said that at current federal funding levels he and his colleagues believe that it will take "100 plus years to secure the nation against unacceptable earthquake risks."

Said O'Rourke, who is president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI): "We face inevitable earthquakes that will affect urban centers nationwide. The cost could reach $100 billion to $200 billion dollars each, with the potential loss of thousands of lives."

The Cornell engineer made his appeal for increased congressional appropriations on behalf of EERI, a national group with 2,500 members seeking to reduce earthquake risk through advancing the science and practice of earthquake engineering. The group recently issued a research and outreach plan to protect the nation against earthquake risks within 20 years by raising federal research funding by three times the current level. "The cost is estimated to be on average $330 million per year for the 20-year duration of the plan, which is less than one-twentieth of the annual projected losses from earthquakes in the U.S.," O'Rourke said.

Since 1978, the backbone of the U.S. program for reducing seismic risks and mitigating the effects of earthquakes has been the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The program's efforts include producing earthquake-hazard maps, seismic designs for new buildings and guidelines for rehabilitating existing buildings and bridges. The research made possible by NEHRP, said O'Rourke, is the engine that drives earthquake-resistant practices and seismic-risk reduction in the United States. "We need Congress to maintain a strong and viable NEHRP," he said.

However, said O'Rourke, NEHRP's 2000 strategic plan, which called for increased research and outreach activities, has yet to be published or implemented. The most "significant limitations" affecting NEHRP, said the Cornell engineer, are leadership and the eroding level of federal funding, which has fallen by about 40 percent in real dollars since the program's inception.

This decline, he said, is despite the fact that investments in earthquake engineering through NEHRP have resulted in technical advances that apply beyond earthquakes to extreme events associated with other natural hazards such as hurricanes and floods, as well as to severe accidents and terrorist attacks.

He also made reference to the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), an earthquake-monitoring system being built by the U.S. Geological Survey. Appropriations for the system, he said, "are only proceeding at one-tenth the planned rate." Every year the deployment of ANSS is delayed, he said, "we run the risk of missing the opportunity to record the shaking in a manner that will be useful to the engineering community."

He stressed, "putting the instrumentation in after the next earthquake will be too late."

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.

o EERI: http://www.eeri.org

o NEHRP: http://www.wsspc.org/links/nehrp.html

o ANSS: http://www.anss.org/