Tsunamis and Tsunami Hazards in Central America

Mario Fernandez, Enrique Molina, Jens Havskov and Kuvvet Atakan

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2000, vol. 22, issue 2, 116 pages

Abstract: A tsunami catalogue for Central America is compiledcontaining 49 tsunamis for the period 1539–1996,thirty seven of them are in the Pacific and twelve inthe Caribbean. The number of known tsunamis increaseddramatically after the middle of the nineteenth century,since 43 events occurred between 1850 and 1996. This isprobably a consequence of the lack of populationliving near the coast in earlier times. The preliminary regionalization of the earthquakessources related to reported tsunamis shows that, inthe Pacific, most events were generated by theCocos-Caribbean Subduction Zone (CO-CA). At theCaribbean side, 5 events are related with the NorthAmerican-Caribbean Plate Boundary (NA-CA) and 7 withthe North Panama Deformed Belt (NPDB). There are ten local tsunamis with a specific damagereport, seven in the Pacific and the rest in theCaribbean. The total number of casualties due to localtsunamis is less than 455 but this number could behigher. The damages reported range from coastal andship damage to destruction of small towns, and theredoes not exist a quantification of them. A preliminary empirical estimation of tsunami hazardindicates that 43% of the large earthquakes (Ms ≥7.0) along the Pacific Coast of Central America and100% along the Caribbean, generate tsunamis. On thePacific, the Guatemala–Nicaragua coastal segment hasa 32% probability of generating tsunamis after largeearthquakes while the probability is 67% for theCosta Rica–Panama segment. Sixty population centers onthe Pacific Coast and 44 on the Caribbean are exposedto the impact of tsunamis. This estimation alsosuggests that areas with higher tsunami potential inthe Pacific are the coasts from Nicaragua to Guatemalaand Central Costa Rica; on the Caribbean side, Golfode Honduras Zone and the coasts of Panama and CostaRica have major hazard. Earthquakes of magnitudelarger than 7 with epicenters offshore or onshore(close to the coastline) could trigger tsunamis thatwould impact those zones. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: tsunamis; earthquakes; tsunami hazard; wave (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1008102600622 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:22:y:2000:i:2:p:91-116

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1023/A:1008102600622

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().