A Brief Note On Disasters, Vulnerability And Risk

Hazards are activities or events that cause loss of life, injury, property damage, social and economic disruption, or environmental degradation. These hazards can be natural or manmade, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and terrorist attacks. Vulnerabilities can be described as the potential for hazards. Vulnerabilities can be such things as geographical locations, a community up north has a lower vulnerability for hurricanes, as compared to Florida communities. Risk is described as the level of protection a community or area will have if they are involved in a hazard, and the certain groups

A disaster is an unforeseen fatal event that causes massive disruption to the working of a community

A disaster is natural or man-made. Disaster such, as flood has been catastrophic across the United Sates, as they are occurring at unusual time. Therefore, local, states and federal government should begin preparing, planning and create a policy for such times as these, because it is becoming more and more normal for cities to flood. According to Flood Facts, in terms of lives lost and property damaged, floods are just behind tornadoes as the top natural disaster. In the United States, flood damages totaled $8.41 billion in 2011. There were 113 flood-related deaths. Floods can affect any area to some degree; wherever rain falls, flooding can occur.

The term social vulnerability is defined as the threat to a community’s ability to cope with an emergency or disaster (Lindell, Prater, Perry, & Nicholson, 2006, p. 153). This threat level can vary between community segments as well as through each phase of the emergency management process. First, within the pre-impact condition scope, social vulnerability is not much different the definition of the term itself. It is the ability for communities to anticipate, cope, mitigate, and recover from an incident prior to the incident occurring (Lindell et al., 2006, p. 155). However, it is important to note this factor level changes from community to community, household to household, and based on location to hazard-prone areas which make it difficult to determine who may be impacted due to the unequal distribution of vulnerability. Next, within the incident event condition scope, emergency managers could see a wide variety of social impacts (psychosocial, demographic, economic, and political). Though not considered to be long-term, psychosocial impacts could prompt citizens to respond with fatigue, nausea, and/or inability to concentrate in the face of disaster (Lindell, Perry, & Perry, 2007, p. 164). In addition, disaster events cause people to leave the area for temporary shelter. This is only temporary however, communities could experience demographic

Data obtained by assessing social vulnerability must be implemented within each phase of the emergency management process; mitigation, response, and recovery. First, to effectively respond and recover from incidents emergency management agencies must concentrate on the mitigation phase to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. This is achieved through a thorough hazard/vulnerability analysis (HVA). This type of analysis assesses the risk of physical, economic, and social vulnerability within all communities of a given jurisdiction (Lindell et al., 2006, p. 165). Additionally, the basis of the HVA allows emergency managers to effectively plan for disaster by creating pre-planned responses to disasters (rather than improvised response) and staging resources to locations with the highest probability of risk; ultimately contributing to the mitigation and response phases.

Disaster risk indicates the possibility of adverse effects in the future. It originates from the collaboration of social and environmental processes, from the mixture of natural hazards and the vulnerabilities of exposed elements.

Millions of people are affected by natural disasters every year, and their impact can be catastrophic. From the destruction of buildings to the spread of disease, natural disasters can devastate entire countries overnight. Tsunamis, earthquakes and typhoons do not just wreak havoc on land; they also disrupt people's lives in both densely populated cities and remote villages. The definition of natural disasters is any catastrophic event that is caused by nature or the natural processes of the earth. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and volcano eruptions are all types of natural hazards, but when do they become natural disasters? The severity of a disaster is measured in lives lost, economic loss, and the ability of the population to rebuild. Events that occur in unpopulated areas are not considered disasters. People living in poverty are even more vulnerable to natural disasters because they have fewer resources or people to turn to when trying to rebuild their homes and livelihoods. So a flood on an uninhabited island would not count as a disaster, but a flood in a populated area is called a natural disaster. All natural disasters cause loss in some way. Depending on the severity, lives can be lost in any number of disasters. Falling buildings or trees, freezing to death, being washed away, or heat stroke are just some of the deadly effects. Some disasters cause more loss of life than others, and population density affects the death count as well. Natural disasters fall into three broad groups. 1. Those caused by movements of the Earth. These occur with the minimum amount of warning and include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. They are difficult to predict and impossible to stop. All that can be done is to take appropriate action to limit damage and loss of life after they occur. 2. Weather related disasters. These will include hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme heat and extreme cold weather. There will usually be some degree of advanced warning, but since weather is unpredictable, nothing can be done to stop these disasters from developing once the weather system develops. Again, in areas prone to this sort of disaster, some provision can be made

Due to diverse geo-climatic conditions prevalent in different parts of the globe, different types of natural disasters like floods, droughts, earthquakes, cyclones, landslides, and volcanoes etc may strike according to the vulnerability of the area.

Further, domain level percentile rank will be calculated for each of the five domains by calculating the sum of the percentile ranks of the variables in that domain. Finally, an overall percentile rank for each tract will be calculated as the sum of the domain percentile rankings. In addition to total SVI, we will include a count of the number of individual variables with percentile ranks of 90 or higher for each of the five domains and for the tract/block group overall. The total flags variable will help identify the tracts that have vulnerable populations due to a high percentile in at least one demographic variable which may have lower overall social vulnerability scores. At the end of this exercise, we will have six indices one for

Many natural disasters will cause major loss, everything will depend on the cruelty and severity of the event, we know many lives can and will be lost in any major disaster. Depending on the natural disaster we may loss lives, suffer damaged to our properties, many homes will be destroyed by floods, hurricanes, cyclones, twisters, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and a major earthquake. In case of tsunamis many fields will be saturated by salt water and will take years to grow any produce or crops again, with landslides and avalanches homes are beyond repair and will take many months to be repair. All your personal effects, vehicles, documentation will be lost forever because of the natural disaster.

Reporting to the Japanese Cabinet, a panel researching on potential disasters reported the potential of 30-35 meters high disaster hitting Tokyo and other regions in future. The over-reliance on nuclear energy in some of these regions also poses a major threat whenever such disasters strike. The Southwestern Ohi Nuclear power plant was restarted amidst protests from the public. This shows some degree of awareness on the public’s side. Indeed, previous disasters have played a vital role in educating the public on ways of preventing and mitigating further losses in future. On one hand, educating alone may not yield the expected results in terms of disaster prevention. On the other hand, educating the public has been vital in disaster mitigation (Earthquake Engineering Research Group, 2008).

Disasters are risk hazards that have the potential of causing significant societal, personal as well as damage the environment. Disasters manifest themselves in a way that threatens the people or environment. The recent earthquake that resulted to a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that took place on 26th of December flood is an example of a natural hazard that was disastrous and devastating effects on India.

A disaster has become a common wonder in the human civilization. It has been experienced by many even before time was recorded. Though it may appear in different forms, it has been proven to be a great challenge for society cross all statuses, creeds, communities, countries and continents. One of the lasts findings have suggested that the disasters have definitely increased in frequency and intensity.

“The prevention of natural disasters and reducing their impact is a one of the twenty issues considered the most important and urgent global issues in the 21 century. This issue increases and causes great suffer to the level that the global procedures to reduce disasters must to be done… the repetition of the disasters has forced it to be a responsibility of international community”

Reporting to the Japanese Cabinet, a panel researching on potential disasters reported the potential of 30-35 meters high disaster hitting Tokyo and other regions in future. The over-reliance on nuclear energy in some of these regions also poses a major threat whenever such disasters strike. The Southwestern Ohi Nuclear power plant was restarted amidst protests from the public. This shows some degree of awareness on the public’s side. Indeed, previous disasters have played a vital role in educating the public on ways of preventing and mitigating further losses in future. On one hand, educating alone may not yield the expected results in terms of disaster prevention. On the other hand, educating the public has been vital in disaster mitigation (Earthquake Engineering Research Group, 2008).