Tri-lateral workshop on natural hazards: towards a comprehensive assessment of risks due to natural hazards,Canada - U.S.A. - Mexico

Summary This workshop was primarily motivated by the goals of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), one of which is that each country should have a comprehensive national assessment of risks due to natural hazards by the year 2000. It was sponsored by the Environmental Adaptation Research Group (EARG) of Environment Canada, the International Partnerships of Environment Canada, the Geological Survey of Canada, Emergency Preparedness Canada and the Canadian National Committee of the IDNDR. The National Science Foundation of the U.S. and the Government of Mexico supported travel costs related to their delegates. The workshop dealt with both atmospheric hazards such as tornadoes and floods, and geological hazards such as earthquakes and landslides. Nine U.S., eight Mexican and 24 Canadian participants included academia, government and the private sector. Six projects were selected as being of joint interest to all three countries, with lead country and agencies identified for possible future cooperative work.     

Assessment of radiation hazards due to the concentration of natural radionuclides in the environment

A study of natural radionuclides and radon concentration of Hamirpur District of Himachal Pradesh, India is carried out using various methodologies. The activity concentration of the natural radionuclides viz. ²²⁶Ra, ²³²Th and ⁴⁰K is measured using high-resolution-based HPGe detector. Indoor radon measurements in the dwellings of Hamirpur district is carried out using LR-115 type II cellulose nitrate films in the bare mode. The average activity concentrations of ²²⁶Ra, ²³²Th and ⁴⁰K are 35.58, 54.95 and 580.58 Bq kg^?1, respectively. The annual average indoor radon value in the study area varies from 173.90 to 198.25 Bq m^?3, which is well within the recommended action level given by International Commission on Radiological Protection. The indoor radon values obtained in the present investigation are higher than the world average of 40 Bq m^?3. Radon concentration in water samples is measured using RAD7, an active radon detector. The annual effective dose for stomach and lung is determined from the measured value of radon concentration in water. To assess the radiation hazard of the natural radioactivity in all samples to the people, the radium equivalent activity, external hazard index, lifetime fatality risk, absorbed dose rate and total annual effective dose is estimated. The results signify that the studied area does not possess any radiation hazards due to the presence of natural radioactivity concentration.     

A new approach to minimize the loss of life after natural hazards by using Android operating system

Nowadays, the usage rates of smartphones are increasing rapidly. With the versatility of its features, smartphones have succeeded in attracting users. Performing this study has also affected the usage rate of smartphones every day. It is possible to determine the position with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology which is located in smartphones. In this study, smartphone location notification was used to detect the locations of the people who were under debris after the earthquake by means of the phones on them. People who cannot be reached for any reason will be immediately identified, and emergency interventions will be possible. Thus, the survival rate of the injured will be high with early intervention. In this study, it was aimed to minimize the loss of life after the earthquake and all the negativities that would be experienced in society due to this loss. The developed application has been tested in the external world, and the obtained data are given in results section.

     

Consideration of natural hazards in the design and risk management of industrial facilities

Recent chemical accidents precipitated by natural disasters have prompted governments in the United States, Japan, and Europe, among other countries, to re-evaluate current practices in the design and risk management of industrial facilities. This paper presents an overview of natural hazard design considerations and external events risk management requirements in the industrial sector, with particular emphasis on industrial practices in the United States, Japan, and Europe. The analysis shows that although regulations exist to ensure industrial plant structures are built to resist natural hazards (up to the design level), there are few laws to address the performance of non-structural elements and safety and emergency response measures during a natural disaster. Laws usually also refer to natural hazards only indirectly, and provisions to prevent or respond to simultaneous disasters from single or multiple sources concurrent with the natural disaster are usually not present.

Subsidence hazards due to evaporite dissolution in the United States

Evaporites, including gypsum (or anhydrite) and salt, are the most soluble of common rocks; they are dissolved readily to form the same type of karst features that typically are found in limestones and dolomites, and their dissolution can locally result in major subsidence structures. The four basic requirements for evaporite dissolution to occur are: (1) a deposit of gypsum or salt; (2) water, unsaturated with CaSO₄ or NaCl; (3) an outlet for escape of dissolving water; and (4) energy to cause water to flow through the system. Evaporites are present in 32 of the 48 contiguous states of the United States, and they underlie about 35–40% of the land area. Karst is known at least locally (and sometimes quite extensively) in almost all areas underlain by evaporites, and some of these karst features involve significant subsidence. The most widespread and pronounced examples of both gypsum and salt karst and subsidence are in the Permian basin of the southwestern United States, but many other areas also are significant. Human activities have caused some evaporite–subsidence development, primarily in salt deposits. Boreholes may enable (either intentionally or inadvertently) unsaturated water to flow through or against salt deposits, thus allowing development of small to large dissolution cavities. If the dissolution cavity is large enough and shallow enough, successive roof failures above the cavity can cause land subsidence or catastrophic collapse.     

Resilience to natural hazards: a geographic perspective

Resilience is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of natural disaster systems. This article presents the origin of resilience and provides an overview of its development to date, which draws on the wide literature on ecological science, social science, social–environmental system and natural hazards. From a geographic perspective, the model of disaster resilience of “Loss–Response” of Location (DRLRL) was created and disaster resilience was defined from three dimensional mode, which focused on the spatial, temporal scale of resilience and attributes of hazard-affected bodies. A geographic approach was put forward to measure the disaster resilience, including two properties of inherent resilience and adaptive resilience and a case study was implemented in order to validate this approach. This perspective would offer greater potential in application of resilience concept, especially in the process of integrated risk management and disaster recovery.     

Modelling intra-dependencies to assess road network resilience to natural hazards

Natural Hazards - Estimating the resilience of a road network (one of the essential critical infrastructures in times of crisis) to natural hazards is crucial in achieving the goals of disaster...     

Best practices in risk and crisis communication: Implications for natural hazards management

As societies evolve, often the most appropriate response to the hazard must also evolve. However, such shifts in appropriate response to a hazard, whether at the individual or at the societal level, are rarely straightforward: Closing the gap between desired practice and current practice requires effective communication. Although there is a significant literature on how to encourage adaptation before an event and how to communicate during an event, there is less work tying the two together or on how to communicate shifts in larger scale societal response to a natural hazard. In this article, we bring together the best practices and theoretical literature from risk communication and crisis communication and empirical literature on wildfire communication to derive the key characteristics associated with best communication practices. We then use this framework on three case studies of wildfires in California, Montana, and Wyoming, each of which used a different strategy for managing the fire, to understand whether approaching communication more holistically can lead to more desired natural hazard management outcomes. Our working hypothesis was as follows: effective communication before and during a fire would be associated with acceptance of more flexible fire management strategies. The findings indicate how a type of desired management change (more flexible fire management) is associated with more effective communication practices before and during the event.     

The impacting factors of vulnerability to natural hazards in China: an analysis based on structural equation model

The vulnerability to natural hazard is one of the inner characteristics of social economic system, which is determined and impacted by various factors from almost all the aspects of the system. Although it is widely agreed that the economic development, the migration, and the equity of resource allocation are among the most important impacting factors in forming and developing of the vulnerability, their interrelationship is still unclear enough. The study in this paper employs the method of structural equation model to discover the interrelationship between different latent impacting factors, as well as their contributions to the vulnerability of the system to natural hazards. It is found that, among the factors relating social and economic development, the equity of income allocation is a key point. Also the impacts from industrialization are different for different development levels. The conclusions are expected to be helpful references for the decision consideration of the local development strategies.     

International Conference on natural and technical coastal hazards

Report

International Conference on natural and technical coastal hazards     

Errors in expected human losses due to incorrect seismic hazard estimates

Seismic hazard maps are constructed by extrapolating from the frequency of small earthquakes, the annual probability of large, infrequent, earthquakes. Combining the potential contribution from all seismically active volumes, one calculates the peak ground acceleration with a probability to be exceeded by 10?% in 50?years at any given point. The consequential risk, the losses to be expected, derives from the damage the calculated shaking causes to buildings, and the impact on occupants due to collapsing structures. We show that the numbers of fatalities in recent disastrous earthquakes were underestimated by the world seismic hazard maps by approximately two to three orders of magnitude. Thus, seismic hazard maps based on the standard method cannot be used to estimate the risk to which the population is exposed due to large earthquakes.     

A review of multiple natural hazards and risks in Germany

Although Germany is not among the most hazard-prone regions of the world, it does experience various natural hazards that have caused considerable economic and human losses in the past. Moreover, risk due to natural hazards is expected to increase in several regions of Germany if efficient risk management is not able to accommodate global changes. The most important natural hazards, in terms of past human and economic damage they caused, are storms, floods, extreme temperatures and earthquakes. They all show a pronounced spatial and temporal variability. In the present article, a review of these natural hazards, associated risks and their management in Germany is provided. This review reveals that event and risk analyses, as well as risk management, predominantly focus on one single hazard, generally not considering the cascading and conjoint effects in a full multi-hazard and risks approach. However, risk management would need integrated multi-risk analyses to identify, understand, quantify and compare different natural hazards and their impacts, as well as their interactions.     

The risk assessment of landslide hazards in Shiwangmiao based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets-Topsis model

The landslide hazard is one of the geological hazards in mountainous zone. Its occurrence is controlled by many factors. To assess the risk level of landslide in Shiwangmiao accurately, intuitionistic fuzzy sets-Topsis model is introduced at first; secondly, the decisive matrix about the intuitionistic fuzzy sets is established, and the index weight coefficients considering the uncertainty of assessment indices are determined by using the Entropy weight method, then the weighed decisive matrix is obtained. Finally, degree of membership at different levels about the landslide is determined based on the ranking sequence of degree of membership, the risk level corresponding to the maximum degree of membership is final assessment level. The conclusions are drawn that accurate rate of risk estimation about landslide hazards is very high based on the intuitionistic fuzzy sets model in comparison with the current specifications, and the method is feasible for the risk assessment of landslide hazards, so it provides a new method and thoughts to assess the risk level of landslide in future.