Taiwan Faces Greatest Tsunami Risk: Guy Carpenter

A new report finds that southwest Taiwan, specifically, up to 4 meters at the Port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s principal port and the sixth largest container port in the world has the greatest tsunami risk.

Guy Carpenter & Company, a global risk and reinsurance specialist and a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, released the scenario risk report titled Tsunami Risk from Magnitude 9.4 Earthquake in Manila Trench.

The report provides an in-depth study of the tsunami risk from a moment magnitude 9.4 earthquake along the Manila Trench, including the Hong Kong area, Taiwan, Kota Kinabalu, Macau, Manila and Vietnam.

For roughly the past four and a half centuries, the Manila Trench has been building up enormous amounts of energy as the Philippine Sea plate and the Eurasian plate continue to push against one another. Therefore, Guy Carpenter performed a study based on the worst case scenario and developed inundation maps for coastal areas that could be at greater risk from tsunami from a magnitude 9.4 earthquake event in the Manila Trench.

“The Tohoku tsunami event of 2011 and the previous severe events in Chile in 2010 and the Indian Ocean in 2004 have proved that tsunami is a very real and potentially very severe peril with the capability to cause devastation over a broad area. This is particularly the case for the Asia Pacific region where events triggered almost anywhere around the Pacific Rim can strike multiple countries. We undertook the study detailed in this report to help our clients to better understand the potential risk posed to key areas of insurance concentration within the region,” said Mike Owen, head of Analytics for Asia Pacific.

The five most important trans-ocean tsunamis of the twentieth century all occurred in the Pacific Ocean. The United States Geological Survey states that 81 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean, also sometimes referred to as the “Ring of Fire.”

Source: Guy Carpenter