UPDATE: Early damage estimate in neighborhood of $1 billion (NYT).

With news of a 6.0 magnitude earthquake today in San Francisco, I thought I'd provide a perspective on historical damage, The data in the table below are estimates of normalized damage for the top 15 14 events in our dataset -- from Vranes and Pielke 2009 (PDF), which I have quickly updated to 2014 values. A normalization seeks to estimate how much damage would occur if a past event occurred with today's level of wealth and development.

There are a lot of uncertainties in earthquake normalization methods, and those interested in digging deeper should have a look at our paper for the gory details. The top event is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which reminds us that while big earthquakes are rare, they can do lots of damage. For perspective, a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake could cause more than twice the damage caused by all US tornadoes since 1950.

Rank Date Normalized 2014 Damage Deaths Magnitude Location
1 18-Apr-06 $345,207,435,386 2000 8.3 San Francisco 
2 28-Mar-64 $38,910,888,527 131 8.4 Anchorage, Alaska 
3 18-Oct-89 $37,521,623,532 62 7.1 California, Loma Prieta
4 17-Jan-94 $37,046,374,369 60 6.6 Los Angeles
5 11-Mar-33 $19,340,807,766 100 6.3 California, Long Beach
6 13-Apr-49 $11,078,046,116 8 7.0 Olympia, Washington 
7 18-May-80 $9,495,474,795 31 5.2 Washington, Mt St. Helens
8 9-Feb-71 $9,197,179,695 65 6.5 California, San Fernando
9 28-Feb-01 $6,024,383,136 0 6.8 Washingotn, Olympia
10 11-Oct-18 $5,670,099,871 116 7.5 Puerto Rico
11 19-May-40 $5,036,397,660 9 6.5 Imperial Valley (California) 
12 21-Jul-52 $4,116,494,364 13 7.7 Central Calfornia
13 19-Oct-35 $3,989,310,216 2 6.2 Montana
14 29-Jun-25 $3,729,835,249 13 6.3 Santa Barbara (California)