Risk assessment is mainly based on certain scenarios involving an event of a certain size which is thought to be characteristic for the considered type of hazard. However, many natural hazards extend over a wide range of event sizes, and some of them are even free of characteristic scales. An expression for the risk taking into account various event sizes is derived, and its implications on ris...

In the emergency management phase relevant to the occurrence of a catastrophic natural event, the efficiency of the emergency system can be deeply influenced by a correct assignment of the available resources to the “demand” centers, i.e., those elements of the territory that are directly involved in the event. In this paper, a general formulation of the real time optimal resource allocation pr...

JOURNAL OF PACIFIC RIM PSYCHOLOGY Volume 3, Issue 2 pp. 39–46 Address for correspondence: David McIvor, School of Psychology, University of Tasmania, Locked Bag 1342, Launceston TAS 7250, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] In areas susceptible to experiencing the consequences of natural hazard activity, a key facet of risk management involves encouraging citizens to adopt measures that inc...

Measuring resilience to natural hazards is a central issue in the hazard mitigation sciences. This paper applied a confirmatory factor methodology to operationalize the biophysical, built-environment, and socioeconomic resilience dimensions for local jurisdictions in large urban metropolitan areas in South Korea. Mapping the factor scores of the dimensions revealed great spatial variations. The...

UNLABELLED Flooding is the most common and damaging of all natural disasters in the United States, and was a factor in almost all declared disasters in U.S. HISTORY Direct flood losses in the U.S. in 2011 totaled $8.41 billion and flood damage has also been on the rise globally over the past century. The National Flood Insurance Program paid out more than $38 billion in claims since its incep...

In trying to mitigate natural hazards, society plays a high-stakes game against nature. Often nature surprises us when an earthquake, hurricane, or flood is bigger or has greater effects than expected from detailed natural hazard assessments. In other cases, nature outsmarts us, doing great damage despite expensive mitigation measures. These difficulties are illustrated by the March 2011 earthq...

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters events, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. Based on the economic theory of bureaucracy the behavior of a bureau providing the good ”protection against natural hazards” is analysed. The existing model is extended by further institutional constraints accounting for socie...

Working with a large temporal dataset spanning several decades often represents a challenging task, especially when the record is heterogeneous and incomplete. The use of statistical laws could potentially overcome these problems. Here we apply Benford's Law (also called the "First-Digit Law") to the traveled distances of tropical cyclones since 1842. The record of tropical cyclones has been ex...

Based on last years experience we can say, that problem of flood threat in an area has already exceeded engineer-hydrological, respectively water economy frame. There are clear indicions, which indicate, that this phenomenon needs a complex view. It means particularly knowledge of run-off relations, which are connected with time and spacial wide spread of rainfalls, but also with land cover and...