What Can Be Learnt from Past Disasters? Analysis of the Mw 8.8 Mega Earthquake of Central Chile with MORT

The impact, in its various facets, caused by natural disasters, is increasing sharply. Poor resilience contributes to increasing the impact on society, throughout history; natural disasters have exerted a heavy toll of death and suffering. Given this, natural disasters present a big challenge to society today concerning how they are to be mitigated so as to produce an acceptable risk is a question which has come to the fore in extreme ways recently. The Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake of 27 February 2010 has been studied in detail. The paper presents some preliminary results of the analysis of the Chilean earthquake that occurred in February 2010, by applying the Management Oversight Risk Tree (MORT) model. Some of the key questions that have been addressed are: what can be learnt from mega earthquakes? Can MORT be applied to the analysis of mega earthquakes? The MORT may be regarded as a structured checklist in the form of a complex fault tree model that is intended to ensure that all aspects of an organization’s management are looked into when assessing the possible causes of an incident. The MORT accident investigation model has been applied widely to the analysis of accident/incidents that have occurred in industries, such as the oil and gas, nuclear, aviation, etc. It may be argued that the model has the potentiality to be applied to the analysis of natural disasters such as mega earthquakes. It is hoped that by conducting such analysis lessons can be learnt so that the impact of natural disasters such as the Chile´s Mega Earthquake can be mitigated in future similar events.