The U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency sponsored a workshop on, "Continuing Actions to Reduce Losses from Earthquakes in the Mississippi Valley area," in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 24-26, 1982. Seventy individuals (see Appendix A) representing local, State, and Federal government; business and industry; and the research community participated in the three day workshop. Collectively, the participants had backgrounds in disaster preparedness, disaster response and recovery, geology, geophysics, seismology, engineering, architecture, social science, law, insurance, and land-use planning. Two-thirds of them came from the Mississippi Valley area about one half of these had also attended an earlier USGS-FEMA workshop held in Knoxville, Tennessee on September 16-18, 1981 (Hays, 1982).

The St. Louis workshop is the 18th in the continuing series of conferences and workshops which the Geological Survey initiated in 1977 to improve the transfer and application of research results throughout the Nation. It is the second workshop to focus on dealing with the earthquake threat in the Eastern United States. The first one, "Preparing for and Responding to a Damaging Earthquake in the Eastern United States," was held in Knoxville, Tennessee, and emphasized the development of a draft 5-year plan to improve the state-of-earthquake-preparedness. The Knoxville workshop demonstrated that policymakers and members of the scientific-technical community can assimilate and synthesize a great deal of information and work together to devise practical plans. The St. Louis workshop, a sequel to the Knoxville workshop, identified those actions out of the range of possible actions which are most achievable; that is, the actions having the highest payoff and trre lowest cost and effort requirements. These action plans, which identify steps that can be undertaken immediately to reduce losses from earthquakes in each of the seven States in the Mississippi Valley area, are contained in this report. The draft 5-year plan for the Central United States, prepared in the Knoxville workshop, was the starting point of the small group discussions in the St. Louis workshop which lead to the action plans contained in this report. For completeness, the draft 5-year plan for the Central United States is reproduced as Appendix B.