A Radiological Bomb Attack on the Downtown Los Angeles Financial District

Harry W. Richardson (), Qisheng Pan (), Peter Gordon (), JiYoung Park () and James E. Moore ()
Additional contact information
Harry W. Richardson: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Mexico
Qisheng Pan: Texas Southern University
Peter Gordon: University of Southern California
JiYoung Park: Sungkyunkwan University
James E. Moore: University of Southern California

Chapter Chapter 4 in Regional Economic Impacts of Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters and Metropolitan Policies, 2015, pp 65-85 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter summarizes a study on the economic impacts of a radiological bomb attack on a major office building in Downtown Los Angeles financial district. A radiological bomb will generate effects within an extensive radiation plume that is divided into two zones with varying evacuation times, an inner zone with 1 year evacuation and an outer zone with only 1 month evacuation time. The SCPM (Southern California Planning Model) is employed to simulate household and firm relocation in three scenarios: (1) an exit scenario where households and firms in both the inner and the outer zones disappear, (2) a relocation scenario where households and firms in the inner and the outer zones relocate to somewhere else within the five-county metropolitan region, and (3) a hybrid scenario where the households and firms in the inner zone disappear while those in the outer zone relocate. The impact analysis focuses on business interruption effects only. It finds that the effects on the inner zone play a dominant role because of its long evacuation period. The exit scenario has an aggregate impact of $5.9 billion of output losses and 40,391 job losses. The relocation scenario has neutral effects from a regional perspective but direct losses in the impacted zones are 7,257 jobs and $2.617 billion of output. The hybrid scenario may be the most realistic one but its impacts are only marginally lower than the exit scenario because of the dominance of the inner zone impact.

Keywords: Terrorist Attack; Outer Zone; Vacancy Rate; Highway Network; Evacuation Period (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:adspcp:978-3-319-14322-4_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319143224

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-14322-4_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in Spatial Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().