Economic Impacts of Terrorist Attacks and Natural Disasters: Case Studies of Los Angeles and Houston

Large metropolitan regions are vulnerable to terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Ports and downtown business districts could be targets of terrorist attacks and are also prone to substantial losses from natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes. It is important for stakeholders and decision makers to be aware of the spatial distribution of these losses and recognize the potential economic losses from various hypothetical terrorist attacks and natural disasters on these crucial facilities and core sites. The Southern California Planning Model (SCPM), a GIS-based regional planning model developed initially for the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area, is capable of endogenizing freight and passenger flows and allocating impacts spatially via unexpected impedances to trips and shipments through the regional highway network. This chapter presents the SCPM model and describes several applications via three case studies of hypothetical events: (1) A radiological bomb or so-called “dirty bomb” attack and conventional bomb attacks on the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; (2) A radiological bomb attack on a large office building in Downtown Los Angeles Financial District; and (3) A hurricane striking the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria (HGB) region. The results show that the model can allocate the losses to various types of impact analysis zones or political jurisdictions. The methods used in this study are adaptable to almost any kind of terrorist and natural disaster attacks and also transferable to other large metropolitan areas.