AMERICANS BUILD IN RISKY AREAS; CHOICE DRIVES UP COSTS OF DISASTERS, REPORT SAYS.

Byline: Daily News Staff and Wire Services

Natural disasters cost America about $1 billion a week and grow more expensive and catastrophic because people build in such hazard-prone areas as Los Angeles, according to a federal study released Wednesday.

``It would be absurd to say we should abandon Southern California,'' said the lead author, Dennis Mileti, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and now is a professor at the University of Colorado.

``The sunshine is too bright and the fruit is too sweet. But we know that certain parts of the Southland are subject to higher shaking intensities,'' said Mileti, director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center in Boulder, Colo.

As more people move to hazard-prone areas, major catastrophes get costlier, Mileti said. Seven of the nation's 10 costliest have struck in the last decade, including the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, the most costly urban disaster.

Earthquake-shaken California, hurricane-hit Florida and just plain old dangerous Texas are most at risk, the authors conclude in the 351-page report.

Los Angeles residents, government and businesses must decide what losses they can accept in earthquakes or build in the safe areas, he said.

Some experts agreed with the warnings.

``You can't get the tens of millions of people who live here to relocate,'' said Bob Canfield, past chairman of the Los Angeles County Emergency Preparedness Commission and a chief administrative analyst with the city's Emergency Preparedness Division. ``We should look at how to make it safe for people to live in these environments.''

Mileti said people can't really solve the problem of disasters, especially by building stronger and ``smarter'' buildings. Such construction will only make matters worse when what he calls the inevitable lollapalooza of a disaster strikes, such as a four-minute earthquake in the San Francisco Bay or a very powerful hurricane through south Florida.

If the 30-second Northridge Earthquake of 1994 had lasted a minute or more, engineering studies indicate, many Southern California steel high-rise buildings would have fallen because they were so stressed even in the briefer quake.

But Los Angeles building officials said lessons from the Northridge Earthquake were used in strengthening building standards so homes and businesses will better withstand future earthquakes.

``Although there was a lot of damage in the Northridge Earthquake, compared with other parts of the world with similar-size earthquakes, our buildings survived very well,'' said David Keim, principal building inspector with the city's Department of Building and Safety. ``We expect our buildings to fare much better in future earthquakes with all the new construction going on in Los Angeles.''

Now the city requires steel high-rise buildings to undergo inspections to determine if there was damage from the Northridge Earthquake and what needs to be done to fix it, Keim said.

Despite the recent mayhem, deaths from hurricanes and other disasters are down in recent years because of better storm warnings, experts say. Overall, more than 24,000 people died from disasters between 1979 and 1994, Mileti said. Tornadoes account for more deaths than other disasters, he said, as they are the hardest to prepare for.

The five-year analysis was produced by 132 academic, government and private disaster experts and financed by the National Science Foundation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.

``The extensive urbanization and high population density of Florida and California, coupled with their high-risk potential, clearly explain their top rankings,'' the report says. ``Texas also ranks high because of the sheer number and diversity of hazardous events that occur there, as well as the state's large, although more dispersed, pattern of urbanization.''

The report urges a shift away from development in dangerous areas and disaster-resistant construction toward reliance on environmental planning aimed at making cities more sustainable during disasters.

People also must face the fact that there is no way to totally prevent deaths and damage from disasters, and they should live with nature instead of trying to challenge it, the report suggests.

Some of the high-tech engineering used to prevent or cope with disasters, such as building dams and using earthquake-resistant construction methods, are only postponing and increasing the damage from the inevitable, the report claims in its most controversial section.

Experts disputed the contention that better construction is pointless.

``That's nonsense,'' said Frank Koutnik, policy and planning chief for the Florida Division of Emergency Management. ``You don't want to be lulled into a false sense of security because of technology, but I think building enhancements can have a tremendous loss-reduction impact.''

The researchers also found that the private insurance industry isn't doing enough to make people think about risks when they build and move, said one of the study's co-authors, Howard Kunreuther, co-director of the Wharton School's Center of Risk Management and Decision Processes.

Insurance premiums, especially in places like California and Florida, are too low and don't really represent the risk the company is taking, said Kunreuther, author of a companion book to the report called ``Paying the Price.''

Insurance companies should offer incentives and banks should provide cheap financing to help people retrofit homes to be stronger for hurricanes and earthquakes, Kunreuther said.

Daily News staff writer Troy Anderson contributed to this story.