Tsunami Studies and Their Application to Peru’s Socio-Economic Development and Emergency Planning

Abstract

Tsunami, although not so frequent, have caused devastating effects along the Peruvian coast in the past. For example on October 28, 1746, Callao, Peru’s man sea port, was completely destroyed by tsunami waves killing 4,800 of its 5,000 inhabitants.

In view o this fact, just after attending the 1981 Sendai-Sanriku Tsunami Symposium, the author started investigations in Peru with two main objectives: To try to protect people living in tsunami inundation zones; and to include disaster mitigation measures in the investment being made for the country’s social and economic development, including city expansion and new land development along the low-lying sea shores.

This papers deals with the investigation results, with emphasis on the experience gained the evacuation drills made in Callao, located in the center of the country’s coastal strip. It was found that supervising and evaluating the drills dramatically improves the subsequent exercises. This paper also deals with new study programs covering 488km of the northernmost coast up to the border with Ecuador and the 632km of the Peruvian S-W coast to the Peru-Chile border, where a seismic gap is said to exist. Those programs, which started in 1989 and 1992 respectively, include the sea ports of Paita in the north, and Ilo in the south, where important investment is expected in the near future as they have been declared free trade areas by the Peruvian government; in addition, Ilo will be the connecting point of southern Peru, Bolivia and western Brazil with the Pacific Rim countries.

The study programs also place emphasis on the microzonation studies which produce multiple hazard maps; and their application to land use planning, for the main human conglomerates of those two strips of the Peruvian coast and investment projects, where tsunami hazard is the main concern. In this way the long term impact of the natural hazard is reduced by including disaster mitigation measures in the integrated development planning and its implementation, in the original project formulation. This approach, using non-structural measure is adequate for a developing county like Peru, where a simplified and very low cost microzonation method has been developed.