A disaster is an event that causes serious harm to people, buildings, economies, or the environment, and the affected community cannot handle it alone. Natural disasters like avalanches, floods, earthquakes, and wildfires are caused by natural hazards. Human-made disasters like oil spills, terrorist attacks and power outages are caused by people. Nowadays, it is hard to separate natural and human-made disasters because human actions can make natural disasters worse. Climate change also affects how often disasters due to extreme weather hazards happen.
Landslides, also known as landslips, or rockslides, are several forms of mass wasting that may include a wide range of ground movements, such as rockfalls, mudflows, shallow or deep-seated slope failures and debris flows. Landslides occur in a variety of environments, characterized by either steep or gentle slope gradients, from mountain ranges to coastal cliffs or even underwater, in which case they are called submarine landslides.
A natural disaster is the very harmful impact on a society or community after a natural hazard event. Some examples of natural hazard events include avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, landslides, tropical cyclones, volcanic activity and wildfires. Additional natural hazards include blizzards, dust storms, firestorms, hails, ice storms, sinkholes, thunderstorms, tornadoes and tsunamis. A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property. It typically causes economic damage. How bad the damage is depends on how well people are prepared for disasters and how strong the buildings, roads, and other structures are. Scholars have been saying that the term natural disaster is unsuitable and should be abandoned. Instead, the simpler term disaster could be used. At the same time the type of hazard would be specified. A disaster happens when a natural or human-made hazard impacts a vulnerable community. It results from the combination of the hazard and the exposure of a vulnerable society.
Mount Ruapehu is an active stratovolcano at the southern end of the Taupō Volcanic Zone and North Island volcanic plateau in New Zealand. It is 23 km (14 mi) northeast of Ohakune and 23 km (14 mi) southwest of the southern shore of Lake Taupō, within the Tongariro National Park. The North Island's major ski resorts and only glaciers are on its slopes.
Hazard symbols are recognizable symbols designed to warn about hazardous or dangerous materials, locations, or objects, including electromagnetic fields, electric currents; harsh, toxic or unstable chemicals ; and radioactivity. The use of hazard symbols is often regulated by law and directed by standards organizations. Hazard symbols may appear with different colors, backgrounds, borders, and supplemental information in order to specify the type of hazard and the level of threat. Warning symbols are used in many places in place of or in addition to written warnings as they are quickly recognized and more universally understood, as the same symbol can be recognized as having the same meaning to speakers of different languages.
A tsunami warning system (TWS) is used to detect tsunamis in advance and issue the warnings to prevent loss of life and damage to property. It is made up of two equally important components: a network of sensors to detect tsunamis and a communications infrastructure to issue timely alarms to permit evacuation of the coastal areas. There are two distinct types of tsunami warning systems: international and regional. When operating, seismic alerts are used to instigate the watches and warnings; then, data from observed sea level height are used to verify the existence of a tsunami. Other systems have been proposed to augment the warning procedures; for example, it has been suggested that the duration and frequency content of t-wave energy is indicative of an earthquake's tsunami potential.
The World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction is a series of United Nations conferences focusing on disaster and climate risk management in the context of sustainable development. The World Conference has been convened three times, with each edition to date having been hosted by Japan: in Yokohama in 1994, in Hyogo in 2005 and in Sendai in 2015. As requested by the UN General Assembly, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) served as the coordinating body for the Second and Third UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in 2005 and 2015.
The International Early Warning Program (IEWP), was first proposed at the Second International Early Warning Conference (EWCII) in 2003 in Bonn, Germany. It developed increasing importance in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed over 200,000 lives and injured over half a million people.
An emergency population warning is a method where by local, regional, or national authorities can contact members of the public to warn them of an impending emergency. These warnings may be necessary for a number of reasons, including:
Emergency evacuation is an immediate egress or escape of people away from an area that contains an imminent threat, an ongoing threat or a hazard to lives or property.
Warning system is any system of biological or technical nature deployed by an individual or group to inform of a future danger. Its purpose is to enable the deployer of the warning system to prepare for the danger and act accordingly to mitigate or avoid it.
Prediction of volcanic activity, and volcanic eruption forecasting, is an interdisciplinary monitoring and research effort to predict the time and severity of a volcano's eruption. Of particular importance is the prediction of hazardous eruptions that could lead to catastrophic loss of life, property, and disruption of human activities.
Disaster informatics or crisis informatics is the study of the use of information and technology in the preparation, mitigation, response and recovery phases of disasters and other emergencies. Disaster informatics or emergency involves increased use of technology to depict how people can react to emergencies and other disasters that require fast improvements on recovery and preparedness. It began to emerge as a field after the successful use of a variety of technologies in disasters including the Asian tsunami, September 11th and Hurricane Katrina.
An earthquake warning system or earthquake alarm system is a system of accelerometers, seismometers, communication, computers, and alarms that is devised for rapidly notifying adjoining regions of a substantial earthquake once one begins. This is not the same as earthquake prediction, which is currently not capable of producing decisive event warnings.
Disaster risk reduction aims to make disasters less likely to happen. The approach, also called DRR or disaster risk management, also aims to make disasters less damaging when they do occur. DRR aims to make communities stronger and better prepared to handle disasters. In technical terms, it aims to make them more resilient or less vulnerable. When DRR is successful, it makes communities less the vulnerable because it mitigates the effects of disasters. This means DRR can make risky events fewer and less severe. Climate change can increase climate hazards. So development efforts often consider DRR and climate change adaptation together.
J-Alert is the early warning system used in Japan. J-Alert was launched in February 2007. The system is designed to quickly inform the public of threats and emergencies such as earthquakes, severe weather, and other dangers. The system was developed in the hope that early warnings would speed up evacuation times and help coordinate emergency response.
The Mount Rainier Volcano Lahar Warning System consists of two separate components, operating in tandem: Acoustic Flow Monitors (AFM) and the All Hazard Alert Broadcast (AHAB) sirens. The AFM system was developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1998 and is now maintained by Pierce County Emergency Management. The purpose of the warning system is to assist in the evacuation of residents in the river valleys around Mount Rainier, a volcano in Washington, in the event of a lahar. Pierce County works in partnership with the USGS, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN), Washington Military Department's Emergency Management Division, and South Sound 9-1-1 to monitor and operate the system.
A hazard is a potential source of harm. Substances, events, or circumstances can constitute hazards when their nature would potentially allow them to cause damage to health, life, property, or any other interest of value. The probability of that harm being realized in a specific incident, combined with the magnitude of potential harm, make up its risk. This term is often used synonymously in colloquial speech.
A volcanic hazard is the probability a volcanic eruption or related geophysical event will occur in a given geographic area and within a specified window of time. The risk that can be associated with a volcanic hazard depends on the proximity and vulnerability of an asset or a population of people near to where a volcanic event might occur.
Disaster preparedness in museums, galleries, libraries, archives and private collections, involves any actions taken to plan for, prevent, respond or recover from natural disasters and other events that can cause damage or loss to cultural property. 'Disasters' in this context may include large-scale natural events such as earthquakes, flooding or bushfire, as well as human-caused events such as theft and vandalism. Increasingly, anthropogenic climate change is a factor in cultural heritage disaster planning, due to rising sea levels, changes in rainfall patterns, warming average temperatures, and more frequent extreme weather events.
