USAID-USGS Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team: Collaborating with International Partners to Reduce Earthquake Risk Worldwide

The Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team (EDAT) assists local scientists and decision makers with studying and responding to earthquake-related hazards in their respective countries. EDAT was co-founded in 2009 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA; formerly the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance). EDAT works in the background to support foreign partners, generally in developing countries, with activities including seismic hazard and risk identification, monitoring, and training. EDAT scientists who engage in international capacity building and response activities, in turn, broaden their scientific and cultural perspectives and develop important relationships with international colleagues. EDAT scientists have specialties such as paleoseismology and ground rupture, network seismology, geotechnical engineering, ground failure, strong-motion, geodesy, seismic hazard/risk assessment, tsunami source characterization, and outreach. EDAT scientists work closely with the USGS and USAID/BHA Landslide Disaster Assistance Team (LDAT) on earthquake-triggered landslides and humanitarian response activities such as the 2010 magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake and the 2015 magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal, among others. EDAT currently has projects in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, and Nepal on topics including seismic hazard assessment, fault studies, earthquake ground motions, earthquake early warning, monitoring networks, and others. EDAT also supports global work on real-time products, earthquake scenarios, aftershock forecasting, etc. During Fiscal Year 2020, EDAT scientists and their partners reported training 1,457 individuals, and activities are estimated to have contributed to disaster risk reduction efforts impacting a minimum of 514 million people living in seismically active areas across the countries with active projects, in addition to global efforts. In addition to EDAT and LDAT, USAID/BHA and the USGS also support the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program. These bilateral activities provide data and scientific expertise to inform international humanitarian assistance activities related to geologic hazards to help save lives worldwide.