Comparison of Jurisdictional Seismic Resilience Planning Initiatives

Three jurisdictional earthquake resilience planning initiatives conducted in California, Washington State, and Oregon are compared: SPUR Resilient City (SPUR), Resilient Washington State (RWS), and Oregon Resilience Plan (ORP). This paper presents an exploratory analysis that reveals divergent and convergent themes across the initiatives to inform similar initiatives in the future. The SPUR initiative was the inspiration for both RWS and ORP. As such, an evolution of ideas is evident from the first initiative to the most recent. While the SPUR initiative was a model for the RWS and ORP initiatives, the process and outcomes of the latter two initiatives were more similar than to the original SPUR initiative. Major examples of this are the smaller scopes, as well as increased prominence and continued innovation of recovery-based performance measurement frameworks to help identify seismic resilience recommendations. The importance of this innovation is not clear, however, based on the small amount of explicit integration with the respective initiative definitions of resilience, goals and recommendations. More systematic research into elements of the SPUR, RWS, and ORP initiatives, such as development of the performance measurement frameworks, is warranted given the initiatives’ popularity and influence on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Community Resilience Planning Guide. The paper concludes by situating the NIST guide in the context of the three seismic resilience planning initiatives.