T Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has recently hit world news and has become well known for man-made disasters, such as terrorist attacks, and the high rate of motor vehicle accidents. However, natural disasters, such as floods have had much less attention, even though it leads to much more damage than the rest of other disasters or accidents combined. This article will present the 2 cases of Jed...

This paper discusses the impact of foreign aid on the recipient country’s preparedness against natural disasters. The theoretical model shows that foreign aid can have two opposing effects on a country’s level of mitigating activities. In order to test the theoretical propositions we analyse the effect of foreign aid dependence on ex-ante riskmanagement activity proxied by the death toll from m...

The progressive constriction of the Mississippi for navigation since 1837 has caused bottom erosion in some stretches. In others the bottom oscillates up and down with time. The high stages rise much more rapidly. Constriction of the river channel causes flooding and makes floods higher; thus navigation works degrade the protection afforded by levees. The combination of navigation works and lev...

This study explores people’s risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in property values are 50% more likely to opt for a risky gamble – a scratch card giving a small chance of...

This study explores people’s risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in property values are 50% more likely to opt for a risky gamble – a scratch card giving a small chance of...

David T. Harris. Truths from the Earth, vol. 2: The Story of the Creations to the Floods . New York: Carlton/Hearthstone, 1996. 338 pp., with bibliogra.

Rivers during floods bring a lot of fallen trees and debris. Video surveillance systems are installed on strategically important places on the rivers. To protect these places from destructions due to accumulation of wood, such systems must be able to automatically detect wood. Image segmentation is performed to separate wood and other moving elements from the rest of the water. Moving objects a...

This paper considers the role of social media in the response to the flooding of 2011 in Genoa (Italy), caused by flash floods during torrential rainfall. Volunteer students created a Facebook page to communicate with citizens and organize support and rescue activities. In this paper, we first look at the story of the 2011 Genoa floods from the point of view of the news media to gain insights i...

This paper argues that life satisfaction data can be used to value natural disasters. We discuss the strengths of this approach, compare it to traditional methods and apply it to estimate and monetize utility losses caused by floods in 17 OECD countries between 1973 and 2004. Using combined cross-section and time-series data, we find a negative impact of floods on life satisfaction that is size...

Floods are the most frequent natural disasters affecting the Moravian-Silesian region. Therefore a system that could predict flood extents and help in the operative disaster management was requested. The FLOREON system was created to fulfil these requests. This article describes utilization of HPC (high performance computing) in running multiple hydrometeorological simulations concurrently in t...