Earthquake Resilience Act Mandates National Report Card and Faster Utility Recovery After Quakes

If you live in an earthquake zone, or anywhere that relies on infrastructure that crosses one, the Earthquake Resilience Act is about to change how your power and water companies plan for disaster. This bill isn’t just about making buildings safer; it’s a big-picture shift toward making sure life can get back to normal much faster after the ground stops shaking.

The core of the bill requires the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to deliver a comprehensive national report card on earthquake readiness within two years. This isn't just an academic exercise; NIST, working with FEMA, the National Science Foundation, and state/local governments, has to clearly show where communities have actually made progress and, more importantly, where the major gaps in resilience still exist. Think of it as a mandatory, nationwide inspection of how prepared we really are, focusing on measurable progress rather than just good intentions.

Moving Beyond Building Codes: The 'Functional Recovery' Goal

For decades, the standard for earthquake safety was preventing buildings from collapsing and killing people. That’s critical, but it ignores the reality of modern life: who cares if your house is standing if you don't have water, power, or internet for weeks? This bill updates the existing National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program to focus heavily on functional recovery.

This means the program must now set specific, measurable performance goals for how quickly essential services—like electricity, gas, water, and communication lines—can be restored after a major seismic event. For the average person, this is the most critical change: your utility companies and transportation departments will have to meet official targets for getting things back online. This shift will likely force utility providers and transportation agencies to invest in new standards and preparedness measures, which could eventually translate into higher costs for consumers or taxpayers, but with the clear benefit of shorter recovery times.

Hardening the Lifelines

Another significant provision mandates the development of official standards and consensus codes specifically for improving how lifeline infrastructure recovers. Lifelines are the critical systems we depend on—roads, bridges, power grids, pipelines, and communication networks. Currently, recovery planning for these systems can be fragmented. This bill requires coordinated national standards to ensure that when a bridge or a power substation is damaged, the plan for its repair is already baked into the design and recovery procedures. This means less guesswork and faster action when disaster strikes, which is good news for anyone trying to get to work or run a business after an event.

To keep the science sharp, the bill also requires the program to integrate real-time data streams from modern global navigation satellite systems (GNSS networks) alongside traditional seismic data. In plain English, they’re using cutting-edge satellite and geodetic data to get a much more precise, immediate picture of ground movement, which means better planning and more accurate hazard maps. The net result is that the people making decisions about where to spend resilience dollars will have better information than ever before, moving earthquake policy out of the 1970s and into the modern digital age.