Earthquake Occurrence in the Reno-Carson City Urban Corridor

INTRODUCTION The Reno-Carson City urban corridor is the second most populated region in Nevada and lies in one of the most seismically active parts of the state. This has prompted the development of an earthquake scenario (dePolo et at. , 1996) to assist with earthquake preparedness and emergency response planning within the corridor's communities. As part of this effort, we have estimated probabilities of a potentially damaging earthquake affecting the scenario area (see Figure 1) over a 50-year time period. This paper briefly describes local historical earthquakes of magnitude ≥ 6 and compares their occurrence rates with b -value curve extrapolations from the instrumental time period and with preliminary estimates based on local fault activity rates. HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKES Thirteen earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater have occurred in the scenario region since 1850 (see Figure 1 and Table 1). These events are briefly described in the Appendix. For many of the earlier...