Hazard Mitigation and Preparedness

An Introductory Text for Emergency Management and Planning Professionals

Dylan Sandler, Anna K. Schwab

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000436020
• Auflage: 3
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Études du développement mondial

An essential text for today's emerging professionals and higher education community, the third edition of Hazard Mitigation and Preparedness provides accessible and actionable strategies to create safer, more resilient communities. Known and valued for its balanced approach, Hazard Mitigation and Preparedness assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, presenting the major principles involved in preparing for and mitigating the impacts of hazards in emergency management. Real-world examples of different tools and techniques allow for the application of knowledge and skills.

This new edition includes:

• Updates to case studies and sidebars with recent disasters and mitigation efforts, including major hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Summary of the National Flood Insurance Program, including how insurance rates are determined, descriptions of flood maps, and strategies for communities to help reduce premiums for residents.
• Overview of the ways that climate change is affecting disasters and the tools that emergency managers can use to plan for an uncertain future.
• Best practices in communication with the public, including models for effective use of social media, behavioral science techniques to communicate information about risk and preparedness actions, and ways to facilitate behavior change to increase the public's level of preparedness.
• Actionable information to help emergency managers and planners develop and implement plans, policies, and programs to reduce risk in their communities.
• Updated in-text learning aids, including sidebars, case studies, goals and outcomes, key terms, summary questions and critical thinking exercises for students.
• An eResource featuring new supplemental materials to assist instructors with course designs. Supplements include PowerPoint slides, tests, instructor lecture notes and learning objectives, key terms and a course syllabus.

1

Hazards and Disasters

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123897-1

What You’ll Learn

• Types of natural and human-made hazards
• How hazards differ from disasters
• Costs associated with disasters
• The relationship between climate change and natural hazards

Goals and Outcomes

• Distinguish between hazards and disasters
• Analyze why there are more and bigger disasters
• Discuss the potential costs of a disaster scenario

INTRODUCTION

Disasters are not always natural. Of course, there are many natural hazards in the world, and there are many human-made hazards as well. But not every hazard becomes a disaster. This chapter gives a brief overview of the hazards that face our communities, both natural and human-made, and how a hazard differs from a disaster. Also covered in this chapter are the many costs—economic, social, environmental, and human costs—that are associated with hazards that affect the built environment, along with an introduction to the concept of social vulnerability. It concludes with a brief discussion of how climate change is altering some of the characteristics of the hazards we experience, both now and into the future.

1.1 HAZARDS: PART OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

This section introduces the concept of natural hazards and describes how these naturally occurring phenomena play a vital role in the Earth's dynamic equilibrium. The section also introduces human-made hazards as a potential threat to our communities.

Natural hazards are a part of the world around us, and their occurrence is inevitable. Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and other extreme events are natural phenomena that are largely beyond human control.

Some natural events can change the ecological environment. Consider these impacts caused by natural hazards:

• Wildfires burn forests and grasslands.
• Coastal storms erode beaches, flatten dunes, and create or fill inlets.
• Flooding inundates wetlands and marshes.
• Volcanic eruptions cover the landscape with molten rock and lava.

Despite the destruction caused by natural hazards, these occurrences are part of the natural system. Hazards have been happening for billions of years on the Earth and will continue for eons more. The natural environment is amazingly recuperative and resilient. After a hazard event, ecosystems can regenerate, and habitats are restored in time for the next generation of plant and animal life to begin anew.

1.1.1 The Earth's Dynamic Equilibrium

Many of the events we call “hazards” are in fact necessary and beneficial for natural systems and help maintain balance within the environment. Healthy natural systems maintain a balanced state over long periods of time through a series of adjustments. Change in one part of the system will be balanced by change in another part so that eventually the entire system regains equilibrium, a phenomenon referred to as dynamic equilibrium.

Consider the benefits that result when natural systems absorb the impact of some hazard events and readjust through dynamic equilibrium:

• Wildfires remove low-growing underbrush, opening up the forest floor to sunlight and nourishing the soil so that established trees can grow stronger and healthier.
• Flooding brings nutrients and sediment to wetlands and marshes, creating a rich habitat for a variety of plant and animal species.
• Volcanic lava and ash form fertile soils when they weather and break down, stimulating new plant growth.

These examples illustrate ways in which the environment is not only well-equipped to deal with what humans consider hazards but often requires them to renew and maintain natural systems. Among these natural processes are fluctuations in global temperatures that the Earth has experienced for millennia. Periods of extreme cold as well as periods of higher temperatures have always been part of our dynamic equilibrium. But as we will explore more fully later in this chapter, our changing climate is altering the naturally occurring ebb and flow of the Earth's systems, including alterations in the causal processes of some classes of natural hazards.

1.1.2 Types of Natural Hazards

Natural hazards can be classified according to the physical processes involved in their occurrence. Five broad categories of natural hazards are:

• Meteorological (hurricanes, tropical storms, typhoons, tornadoes, snow and ice storms, thunderstorms, etc.)
• Geological (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, landslides, subsidence, etc.)
• Hydrological (floods, droughts, wildfire, etc.)
• Infectious disease (pandemic flu, vector-borne diseases, etc.)
• Extraterrestrial (meteorites impacting the Earth's surface)

Physical parameters of natural hazards include intensity and severity, measures that indicate the relative strength of a particular hazard. Hurricanes, for instance, are often categorized using the Saffir-Simpson scale, which ranks hurricanes from 1 to 5 according to sustained wind speed. Earthquakes are often described in terms of magnitude, a unit of measurement that describes the relative size at the source of the earthquake, often using the moment magnitude scale. These systems of hazard measurement are used by professional meteorologists, hydrologists, seismologists, and other scientists interested in studying and predicting natural hazard events. These scales also provide planners, emergency managers, engineers, and decision-makers at all levels with a common terminology to describe, anticipate, plan for, and manage natural hazards.

Although this book will explore many types of natural hazards, we will not discuss extraterrestrial hazards further. There have been cases of meteorites piercing the atmosphere and impacting the surface of the Earth, but these events are extremely rare and unlikely to be a direct focus of preparedness and mitigation planning.

LOCATION MATTERS

Some natural hazards occur only in certain regions of the United States. Active volcanoes are not found in New England, but in Hawaii volcanoes produce lava, ash, and steam at regular intervals. Other types of hazards are more widely distributed and can be found almost anywhere. Flooding can occur wherever water sources overflow their normal channels. In fact, flash floods can happen even in areas that experience drought most of the year, such as Las Vegas, Nevada. Still other types of hazards occur quite frequently in one part of the country but are also possible in other areas that experience them less often. For example, the risk of earthquakes in California is well documented, but less well known is the large earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886. The risk of an earthquake occurring there in the near future is fairly significant.

1.1.3 Human-Made Hazards

There are two major categories of human-made hazards: technological hazards and terrorism. Technological hazards may be caused by accident—either through incompetence, poor planning, operator error, faulty equipment, bad weather, or some other mishap. For example, the risk of a chemical spill caused by a train derailment would be considered a technological hazard. Terrorism, on the other hand, implies an intentional act; that is, some individual or group means to cause harm to further a particular agenda, whether political, social, economic, religious, or a combination of missions. Although our understanding of human-made hazards is increasing, our ability to completely prevent either terrorism or technological hazards is still limited. We will explore human-made hazards and their effects in Chapter 5.

It is also important to note that, while it is helpful to classify different types of events into distinct categories for the sake of planning, the lines between these categories are often blurry and may change over time. For example, while infectious diseases are naturally occurring events, these can also be weaponized and used as part of a terrorist plot. Similarly, nuclear risks can exist both as unintentional hazards resulting from malfunctions of nuclear power plants or as an intentional threat from state-sponsored terrorism.

SELF-CHECK

• Define natural hazards and dynamic equilibrium.
• Discuss the beneficial functions of two natural hazards.
• Describe the differences between technological hazards and terrorism.

1.2 HAZARDS AND DISASTERS: NOT THE SAME

Natural hazards occur as part of the balance of nature, and natural environments and ecosystems can usually recover and restore themselves after a hazard event. A disaster is something different. A disaster results when a natural hazard takes place where humans are located and alters the normal functioning of a community or a society. A disaster is caused not just by a hazardous physical event but the interaction of that event with vulnerable social conditions, which leads to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects. In other words, it is only when people are injured or property is damaged by a hazard that we experience it as a disaster. A similar distinction can be made for some human-made threats. For example, a vulnerability within a government database may exist for years, but it is not until a cyberattack is able to exploit the vulnerability and disrupt operations that a disaster has occurred.

1.2.1 An Official Definition of Disaster

The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act is the primary legislation authorizing the federal government to provide disaster assistance to states, local governments, Native American tribes, and individuals and families. The Stafford Act defines a major disaster as:

Any natural catastrophe (including hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of the cause, any fire, flood or explosion, in any part of the United States, which in the determination of the President causes damage of sufficient severity and magnitude to warrant major disaster assistance under this Act to supplement the effort and available resources of States, local governments, and disaster relief organizations, in alleviating the damage, loss, hardship, or suffering caused thereby.

As this definition indicates, a disaster, whatever its cause, is an event of such magnitude and severity that the ability of states and local governments to cope is overwhelmed (see Photo 1.1). The threshold for determining what constitutes a disaster depends upon the resources and capabilities of states and local communities, as supplemented by relief organizations such as the American Red Cross. The patchwork of policies and regulations that makes up our system of governance has direct bearing on these resources and capabilities. Chapters 6–8 elaborate on the hazards management framework that exists in our federalist system of government. These chapters will provide information about how the federal, state, and local governments carry out their responsibilities for disaster management. It is important to note that the federal government is responsible for providing assistance only after other resources have been depleted. How strictly this policy is actually carried out is discussed in later chapters as well. The politics of extreme natural events can significantly affect the way in which disaster declarations are made and how disaster funds are disbursed from the national treasury.

1.2.2 Why Are The...