A Radiological Bomb Attack on the Downtown Los Angeles Financial District

This chapter summarizes a study on the economic impacts of a radiological bomb attack on a major office building in Downtown Los Angeles financial district. A radiological bomb will generate effects within an extensive radiation plume that is divided into two zones with varying evacuation times, an inner zone with 1 year evacuation and an outer zone with only 1 month evacuation time. The SCPM (Southern California Planning Model) is employed to simulate household and firm relocation in three scenarios: (1) an exit scenario where households and firms in both the inner and the outer zones disappear, (2) a relocation scenario where households and firms in the inner and the outer zones relocate to somewhere else within the five-county metropolitan region, and (3) a hybrid scenario where the households and firms in the inner zone disappear while those in the outer zone relocate. The impact analysis focuses on business interruption effects only. It finds that the effects on the inner zone play a dominant role because of its long evacuation period. The exit scenario has an aggregate impact of $5.9 billion of output losses and 40,391 job losses. The relocation scenario has neutral effects from a regional perspective but direct losses in the impacted zones are 7,257 jobs and $2.617 billion of output. The hybrid scenario may be the most realistic one but its impacts are only marginally lower than the exit scenario because of the dominance of the inner zone impact.