Natural Disasters

David C. Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351429221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltwissenschaft

As a well balanced and fully illustrated introductory text, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the physical, technological and social components of natural disaster. The main disaster-producing agents are reviewed systematically in terms of geophysical processes and effects, monitoring, mitigation and warning. The relationship between disasters and society is examined with respect to a wide variety of themes, including damage assessment and prevention, hazard mapping, emergency preparedness, the provision of shelter and the nature of reconstruction. Medical emergencies and the epidemiology of disasters are described, and refugee management and aid to the Third World are discussed. A chapter is devoted to the sociology, psychology, economics and history of disasters.; In many parts of the world the toll of death, injury, damage and deprivation caused by natural disasters is becoming increasingly serious. Major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods and other similar catastrophes are often followed by large relief operations characterized by substantial involvement of the international community. The years 1990-2000 have therefore been designated by the United Nations as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction.; The book goes beyond mere description and elevates the field of natural catastrophes to a serious academic level. The author's insights and perspectives are also informed by his practical experience of being a disaster victim and survivor, and hence the unique perspective of a participant observer. Only by surmounting the boundaries between disciplines can natural catastrophe be understood and mitigation efforts made effective. Thus, this book is perhaps the first completely interdisciplinary, fully comprehensive survey of natural hazards and disasters. It has a clear theoretical basis and it recognizes the importance of six fundamental approaches to the field, which it blends carefully in the text in order to avoid the p

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The global problem

Globally, it appears that the toll of death and damage in natural disasters is increasing (Fig. 1.1), although there is no international databank of sufficient comprehensiveness to verify this supposition. However, it seems that the frequency of the most severe impacts on the socio-economic system is decreasing, thanks to improvements in prediction, warning, mitigation and international aid. The cost to the global economy now exceeds US$50,000 million per year, of which a third represents the cost of predicting, preventing and mitigating disasters and the other two thirds represent the direct costs of the damage. Death tolls vary from year to year around a global mean of about 250,000, while major disasters kill an average of 140,000 people a year. About 95 per cent of the deaths occur in the Third World, where more than 4,200 million people live (Table 1.1).

Natural catastrophe can also have a severe impact on developed countries, notably Japan, Italy and the USA. In the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former USSR), natural disasters kill 150–200 people each year and injure several thousand (Porfiriev 1992), while in the USA, about 30 disasters, including 15 “states of emergency”, are declared in an average year. For example, in 1983, 34 “major disasters” and four other states of emergency were declared federally, and 31 states and one overseas territory were affected. Floods account for about 40 per cent of the damage caused by natural disasters, while hurricanes and other tropical storms produce the largest number of fatalities, about 20 per cent of the total for all natural hazards. Overall, the number of deaths seems to show little increase (it averaged 332 per disaster over the period 1971–80), but damages and the costs of mitigation arising from natural hazards have been increasing for coastal erosion, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides and tornadoes. Mitigation costs have been relatively stable for drought, lightning, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, frost, hailstorms, urban snow and windstorms, but damages have been rising for the last five of these (White & Haas 1975).

Figure 1.1 Number of disasters and average losses, 1960–88 (data from Berz 1988).

Table 1.1 Loss of life by disaster type and by continent, 1947–80 (after Shah 1983, p. 206).

Natural catastrophes thus have the power to exert a substantial and consistent influence on modern society. But there are several additional reasons why people should be encouraged to take an interest in and seek to understand them. First, in professional, administrative and political roles, many people will have to deal with and face the effects of disaster in their own communities and spheres of influence. Secondly, the more technologically complex our society becomes, the more diverse are the risks and effects of disaster; the more people travel and relocate, the more they put themselves at risk. Thirdly, it is vital to dispel popular myths and misconceptions about the occurrence and impact of disasters, for their effects can only be combatted effectively if we have a rational and objective understanding of them. Finally, in keeping with the new spirit of global internationalism, an interest in problems of the Third World is to be encouraged. Natural disasters are a very important component of such questions.

Objective analysis requires that the sensational aspects of disasters be played down and that we assume a sober, responsible attitude to them. This also means that anecdotal and purely descriptive approaches should be avoided: case studies should be used only where they genuinely demonstrate or illustrate fundamental principles. Hence a rigorous approach to natural disasters requires that we look for the common regularities in each event, however unique it may at first seem. In this way will it be possible to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of natural catastrophe.

In this context there is good reason to ask whether the newly emerging field of disaster studies merits the status of a discipline. The answer may be “yes”, in that it does have some general principles. On the other hand, it may be “no”, in that the field constitutes, not so much a corpus of information as a very heterogeneous mixture of observations, regularities, hypotheses and techniques derived from a wide variety of other disciplines. It is also a field in which practical experience is as useful as academic study, especially as social and ethical problems must be tackled that cannot be resolved by science alone. Thus disaster studies are highly distinctive: they consist not merely of geology, geography, sociology, and other well-defined academic disciplines, but also of preparedness training and, quite simply, the application of sound judgement to practical problems. One may argue, indeed, that every citizen should receive basic training in disaster preparedness, as already is the case in Japan (Arnold 1984).

Having briefly reviewed the problem of natural catastrophe in its world-wide context, we will now establish a theoretical basis for the practical analysis of disasters.

Definitions and basic concepts

Initial definitions

The term natural hazard has been defined in four ways. It is:

(a) “A naturally occurring or man-made geologic condition or phenomenon that presents a risk or is a potential danger to life or property” (American Geological Institute 1984);

(b) “An interaction of people and nature governed by the co-existent state of adjustment of the human use system and the state of nature in the natural events system” (White 1973);

(c) “Those elements in the physical environment [which are] harmful to man and caused by forces extraneous to him” (Burton & Kates 1964);

(d) “The probability of occurrence within a specified period of time and within a given area of a potentially damaging phenomenon” (UNDRO 1982).

From this it is clear that we are dealing with a physical event which makes an impact on human beings and their environment and, unless this conjunction occurs, there will be no hazard or disaster. The hazard involves the human population placing itself at risk from geophysical events.

A natural disaster can be defined as some rapid, instantaneous or profound impact of the natural environment upon the socio-economic system. Turner specified the phenomenon more completely as “an event, concentrated in time and space, which threatens a society or a relatively self-sufficient subdivision of a society with major unwanted consequences as a result of the collapse of precautions which had hitherto been culturally accepted as adequate” (Turner 1976: 755–6). The concentration of effects must be emphasized: disease and malnutrition kill some 15 million children a year worldwide, yet this is not regarded as a disaster in the same sense.

One convenient operational definition of “disaster” postulated that an individual event must cause more than US$1 million in damage, or the death or injury of more than 100 people (see Burton et al. 1978). But this masks considerable potential for variation, especially as small damages can be very costly in highly developed societies, while catastrophic ones may appear cheap in very poor societies with few valuables. In fact, disasters seem to have a disproportionately large impact on very poor and very rich societies: the former present the highest casualty totals and the latter the highest property damages. Impacts can also be high in societies that are industrializing and have lost much of their traditional resistance but not yet developed sophisticated mitigation measures.

In general terms we are not only dealing with phenomena of high magnitude. In fact, we can define an extreme event as any manifestation in a geophysical system (lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere or atmosphere) which differs substantially or significantly from the mean. If human socio-economic and physiological systems do not have the capacity sufficiently to reflect, absorb or buffer the impact, then disaster may occur.

Adjustment and adaptation to risk

The degree to which a society remains unaffected by natural extremes reflects its ability to adapt to hazards (i.e. its absorptive capacity). Adaptation involves awareness of both hazards and the mea...