Early days
If we say that the Earthquake Engineering began in Portugal, after the mega-earthquake of 1755, we can also say that the earthquake engineering based on scientific criteria back in Portugal, to the 50's and it was then constituted 1st regulation with the publication of "Rules of Construction Safety against Earthquakes (RSCCS)" promulgated by Decree No. 41,658 of 31-05-1958 (SPES 2009). Since then, Portugal experienced in this respect, two other regulations. 1 The "Regulation Requests Buildings and Bridges (RSEP)" (Decree No. 44041, 18 November 1961) and later and currently the "Safety Regulations and Measures Structures of Buildings and Bridges (RSA) "(Decree-Law No. 235/83 of 31-05-1983). As has happened in other countries, regulation was, since the beginning, primarily concerned with the safety of human life. In this sense, engineering is serving its purpose.
A New Reality
Currently, it appears that although the high economic costs of earthquakes in developed countries have produced low numbers of victims, in contrast to what has been observed in less developed countries, where earthquakes have caused heavy loss of life but with costs monetary relatively low. This is further evidenced by the ratio of 0.01 ... 0.03 million deaths / $ in developed countries, with the same indicator to vary between 2 ... 27 million deaths / $ in the developing (Pool 2009). While many shortcomings and external circumstances to determine a state of things which need to be much improved, we must thank the many engineers and researchers with many lives saved.
Disaters Economics
But other concerns have emerged, showing clearly the pressing need for investment in research into new areas or dimensions of the seismic risk. Among these are: The economic impact assessment, the assessment of vulnerability of the non-structural, the social impact assessment, modeling the effects of complex interdependent systems. In a recent article by the American Geophysical Union, with the suggestive title of "Catastrophe Finance: An Emerging Discipline" (Elsner et al. 2009) it is clearly evident the desperately need to find new mechanisms for quantification of losses, designed to give stake-holders, insurance, finance, and public decisiors information capable of supporting a new and better prediction and risk quantifying. However, just as Elsner, in the aforementioned article, but long before this, the report ATC-58-1 (ATC 2002), already stressed the fact that although the engineer can predict the expected damage to structures, or even the times of interruption or return to service, economic losses estimation, investment decisions in mitigation or risk transfer should be left to stake-holders or technical finance. Among the latest developments in this area can be cited as authors and Marulanda Crowther (Crowther et al. 2007; Marulanda et al. 2008).
Social Impacts and Propagation Effects
In Europe, culminating in 4 years of discussions between all Member States, the European Commission adopted in 2006 the "European Program for Critical Infrastructure Protection, EPCIP" and on Dec 8, 2008 issued Directive 2008/114/EC "On the identification and designation of European critical infrastructures and the assessment of the need to improve their protection." Whithin the extensive documentation on the EPCIP, the body of the Directive (CEU 2008) and in its accompanying documents, it is explicitly evoked the need to consider the "Economic" and "Social" dimentions, and, if necessary to develop methodologies specifically designed to model the "Phenomena of Propagation (or Cascading) Effects " as it is formally recognized the fact that Infra-Structures interact with each other in a complex environment of mutual interdependence which can not be neglected into the accounting for the adverse consequences of actions that lead to its loss or downtime.
The Hollistic Approach
Beyond this, the necessity of addressing new dimensions of social impact were clearly stated during the conference "Beyond GDP, Measuring progress, true wealth, and the well-being of nations", held in Brussels in 2007, organized European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD and World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). Even so, this issue is currently in very preliminary approaches and few studies in this area can be cited. Among them, the one developed at the University of Barcelona (Carreño et al. 2007) or those developed by Omar Cardona (Cardona 2005). But there are still many gaps in the known approaches. Of these, the most serious concern is mainly with the use of some aggregation processes mathematically not-valid due to the additive aggregation of impacts on non-independent criteria (Cox 2009). Moreover, the importance of the hitherto neglected social impact is evident in the recent realities lived in Sichuan and L'Aquila, where the hardship of phenomena derived from permanent disruption of the social fabric, and the losses of other intangible values, instilled these events a dimension that can not be confined solely to economic loss, physical or will own loss of life.These other dimensions of risk are of particular importance in supporting investment decisions or allocation of resources with mitigation actions, mainly in the presence of holistic approaches such as "Multi-Hazard," or as designated in EPCIP in an environment of "An All Hazards Approach".
Critical-Infrastructures and Non-Structural Losses
With regard to the propagation effects, themselves also in a stage of preliminary approach, at least those produced by major adverse events, proposed approaches exist. Some of them must be reffered such as those develloped at MIT (Apostolakis et al. 2005, Patterson et al. 2005), University of Illionis (Kim et al. 2007) or (Dueñas-Osorio et al. 2007; Dueñas-Osorio et al. 2009). Other, similar methodologies, using formulations traditionally covered in "Network Analysis", are also recommended in works such as FEMA-445 program, launched in August 2006 under the title "Next Genaration-Performance-Based Seismic Design Guidelines. Program Plan for New and Existing Buildings" which provides for a period of 7 years (2006-2013), with funding estimated at $ 11,450,000, to study the vulnerabilities of the non-structural, where the deduced fragilities of components are then used to study the seismic risk in critical infrastructures where these components interact as a complex interdependent system. In Portugal, during the "National Program for Protection of Critical Infrastructures", an algorithm specifically designed to model sector interdependencies was developed for the "National Council for Civil Emergency Planning, CNPCE", and formed the basis for identification of the Critical National Infrastructure . It is noteworthy that during the same program, revealed that more than 65% of the Critical Nationa Infrastructure are located in areas of high seismic risk (Pais et al. 2007).
From Response to Prevention
From this, and because we also believe that the reduction of seismic risk, contrary to what has been the practice, must have to be tackled by ex-ante policies and actions, since the ex-post attitude do not return lives nor the already lost values. As so, we feel the greatest urgency and relevance of new fields of studie in order to fill the present voids in the areas in which we currently know very little, although recognized as crucial as regards to the mitigation of earthquake risk: A better understanding and evaluation of its social dimension, and the modeling of phenomena of spreading effects (or cascading effects) that graetly amplify the social, functional and economic disruption of these events when they strike highly complex systems, such as the interdependent modern societies.
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