In the past few weeks, Red River Parish has experienced more recordable earthquakes than anyone today can remember. Not only have there been at least two 2.3 and 2.8 tremors, but Friday, there were two 2.7 recorded quakes. To the residents of Red River Parish, the frequency of the tremors has become a frightening prospect.

GOHSEP officials in Red River Parish want everyone to be prepared for the possibility of these tremors becoming more intense in the future. Not only have the recent tremors gained the attention of emergency preparedness, but there has also been concern from DOTD about bridges and roads.

Homeland Security officials share the following information:

An often-repeated saying is, “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just published two new guidance documents as part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) related to public safety and the performance of buildings during and after earthquakes.

The first document, Guidance and Recommendations for the Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of Multi-Unit Wood-Frame Buildings with Weak First Stories (FEMA P-807-1), provides technical information about the expected seismic collapse performance of common soft, weak, or open-front (SWOF) building configurations, both in their original and retrofitted conditions. Besides their structural vulnerabilities, SWOF buildings often house significant numbers of people, including socially vulnerable populations. The intended audience for this publication includes building officials, practicing civil and structural engineers, and government officials interested in developing mandatory or voluntary seismic retrofit programs for SWOF buildings.

This guidance (FEMA P-807-1) supplements the original guideline published in 2012, Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of Multi-Unit Wood-Frame Buildings with Weak First Stories (FEMA P-807, Zip file, 11 MB), which introduced a methodology to focus the retrofit on the first story to protect the building from collapse without transmitting excessive additional seismic forces into the upper stories. The new guidance provides recommendations and retrofit design examples while supporting the original FEMA P-807 methodology.

The second document, Recommendations for Cordoning Earthquake-Damaged Buildings (FEMA P-2055-2), provides new recommendations for determining a more streamlined cordon area after an earthquake based on the potential collapse mode of the building. Following a damaging earthquake event, fencing, barricades, or cordons around damaged structures provide safety against potential collapse or debris falling in an aftershock event or progressive collapse. Until now, there has been relatively limited technical guidance on how to determine the area to be cordoned. The recommendations in this document have been prepared for post-disaster building safety evaluators, state and local emergency management departments and their planning staff, emergency operations center staff, and local building officials and building department staff.

The magnitude of an earthquake is expressed in whole numbers and decimal fractions. For example, a magnitude 5.3 is a moderate earthquake, and a 6.3 is a strong earthquake. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude as measured on a seismogram.

In Red River Parish, the magnitudes of these earthquakes have not reached the level of a moderate nature. Unfortunately, with the tendency of increasing magnitudes, the people of Red River need to think of safety in the possibility of a moderate or strong earthquake.