Normalized US Earthquake Damage

UPDATE: Early damage estimate in neighborhood of $1 billion (NYT).

With news of a 6.0 magnitude earthquake today in San Francisco, I thought I'd provide a perspective on historical damage, The data in the table below are estimates of normalized damage for the top 15 14 events in our dataset -- from Vranes and Pielke 2009 (PDF), which I have quickly updated to 2014 values. A normalization seeks to estimate how much damage would occur if a past event occurred with today's level of wealth and development.

There are a lot of uncertainties in earthquake normalization methods, and those interested in digging deeper should have a look at our paper for the gory details. The top event is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which reminds us that while big earthquakes are rare, they can do lots of damage. For perspective, a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake could cause more than twice the damage caused by all US tornadoes since 1950.

Rank	Date	Normalized 2014 Damage	Deaths	Magnitude	Location
1	18-Apr-06	$345,207,435,386	2000	8.3	San Francisco
2	28-Mar-64	$38,910,888,527	131	8.4	Anchorage, Alaska
3	18-Oct-89	$37,521,623,532	62	7.1	California, Loma Prieta
4	17-Jan-94	$37,046,374,369	60	6.6	Los Angeles
5	11-Mar-33	$19,340,807,766	100	6.3	California, Long Beach
6	13-Apr-49	$11,078,046,116	8	7.0	Olympia, Washington
7	18-May-80	$9,495,474,795	31	5.2	Washington, Mt St. Helens
8	9-Feb-71	$9,197,179,695	65	6.5	California, San Fernando
9	28-Feb-01	$6,024,383,136	0	6.8	Washingotn, Olympia
10	11-Oct-18	$5,670,099,871	116	7.5	Puerto Rico
11	19-May-40	$5,036,397,660	9	6.5	Imperial Valley (California)
12	21-Jul-52	$4,116,494,364	13	7.7	Central Calfornia
13	19-Oct-35	$3,989,310,216	2	6.2	Montana
14	29-Jun-25	$3,729,835,249	13	6.3	Santa Barbara (California)