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Earthquake-hazard exposure of residents with potential access and functional needs in the United States

Nathan Wood et al.

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction2026https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106002article
ABDC A
Weight
0.37

Abstract

Earthquake response plans and earthquake early warning (EEW) systems designed for general populations may not consider potential access and functional needs (AFN) of individuals with physical, sensory, cognitive, or social limitations. Previous efforts to map the distribution of these populations have focused on social-vulnerability indices that ignore or oversimply these limitations. The descriptive and exploratory analysis summarized in this United States (U.S.) case study addresses this gap by identifying and integrating spatially explicit data for AFN-related residential populations, earthquake hazards, and county and county equivalents for the conterminous U.S., Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. We focus on 13 AFN-related attributes that relate to an individual’s ability to access information contained in an EEW alert, to understand and process earthquake information or observed ground shaking, and to take self-protective actions based on this information and physical cues of an earthquake. Depending on the demographic attribute, there are millions to tens of millions of U.S. residents with AFN-related attributes in areas considered to have varying likelihoods (2%, 10%, and 50%) of exceedance of a damaging earthquake in the next 50 years. Although these amounts represent low percentages at the national level, the percentage of individuals with AFN-related attributes in many counties and county equivalents substantially exceeds national percentages. No one county, county equivalent, U.S. state, or U.S. territory has the highest percentage of individuals in all AFN-related attributes; therefore, future efforts to increase individual resilience to earthquakes may benefit from understanding the local context of individuals with potential access and functional needs.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106002

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@article{nathan2026,
  title        = {{Earthquake-hazard exposure of residents with potential access and functional needs in the United States}},
  author       = {Nathan Wood et al.},
  journal      = {International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106002},
}

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Earthquake-hazard exposure of residents with potential access and functional needs in the United States

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.