Applied Hazards/Labs

Applied Hazards/Labs

This page will follow my coursework at UW- Eau Claire related to hazards and mitigation.

Using Gaming to asses hazard risk and mitigation strategies

The first lab focuses on mitigation strategies to reduce the impacts of disaster and does so with a game. This game is located at http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/en/home.html

This website is put on by the ISDR, which is the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The ISDR is all about reducing the impact of disasters triggered by natural hazards. They promote ideas to make dealing with disaster easier by moving new legislation and educating the public. A great way to educate a younger generation is with a platform they are pretty familiar with.

Their computer game gives you a small, medium, or large sized community. Your job is to build the communities defenses up through ways such as added construction, education, and other development strategies. There are scenarios for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, tsunamis and earthquakes. My first play through was a tsunami and pictures are below.

 

You get 20 minutes to make changes before a tsunami hits. To minimize damage and lives lost, I made sure to beef up the community centers and hospitals with reinforcement. I also maxed radio communications to make sure everyone was warned. Residential housing was built on higher ground, and/or as far from the coast as possible. The results were pretty good.

 Then I played a second time, where I purposefully tried to wipe out the population. It was pretty easy to do. All of the houses were built on the coast to catch the beautiful ocean scenery. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time or money to build communication towers so the wave struck without any warning. The results are below.

Before                                   After
 <=                                           => 

 

Wouldn't surprise me. After that, I tried out two different disasters: Wildfires and Hurricanes. I picked wildfire because, being a volunteer firefighter, I like to think I know fire prevention strategies for a town. My strategy was to localize all new construction near the water. That way, if there ever was a fire to break out in the community, the water source would be close and abundant. For existing construction, I made sure there were prescribed fires to clear up dead and dry fuels.

I then picked the hurricane scenario thinking it could give me more context of Typhoon Haiyan. The scenarios are short, and prevention methods in the game are so vague. With the options I had, I made sure everything near the coast was anchored down and made sure everyone was educated on evacuation methods. On top of that, I made sure the communication and warning systems were optimized.

 The image to the left, shows how construction was spread out across the island. The mission report shows the impact of the simulated hurricane.

 

Although this seems like a game for children, there is some useful lessons in it. Give it a try!

Mapping Hazard in ArcGIS

Below is a map generated using ESRI data in ArcMap 10.2. This exemplifies the behavioural paradigm of environmental hazards because advances in mapping software make hazards known throughout the population, thus improving our overall understanding of hazard locations. The map shows quaternary linear and areal faults in the United States. To make this more of a complexity based paradigm, I might want to incorporate data showing movement along strike/slip faults and the economic cost that migration might bring.

 Earthquakes

The following describes the use of ArcMap to assess risk of earthquakes using various data sets.

Volcanoes

This map, generated in ArcMap 10.2 shows top 5 countries prone to volcanic eruptions.

Lahars

Lahars are volcano-related mudflows that can be fast and destructive. We will take a look at a lahars path in 3D using ESRI ArcScene. The first image below might not make immediate sense...

The above is a digital elevation model or DEM. Below is a triangular irregular network or TIN. They both can give us a 3D model of an area, but of different qualities. Notice the texture of the tin below, and smoothness of the DEM above.

With land cover draped over the DEM (which  I preferred), we can get an enhanced understanding of how a lahar may flow. The 3D visualization below is the end product.

Mount St. Helens

Below is a map created in ArcGIS 10.2 and shows two rasters of Mount St. Helens before and after its eruption.

After adding a few more data layers, we can look where the explosion caused loss and gain of land. The left image shows volumes lost in different parts of the volcano. We compare these images with the above rasters to get a better understanding of how the explosion changed Mount St. Helens topography.

Mass Movement Events

The above map shows terrain and areas that may be susceptible to mass movement events. Below is a map showing potential slope failure of a mountainous terrain in Forest Falls, California. Lighter areas have a higher slope while dark areas are less sloped.




I continued working on this Forest Falls case. The locater map in the top left corner shows the drainage area and primary path of the drainage. Notice that the dark red color does not follow the stream. That means that during the development of this area, they redirected the natural path of the stream and in place of the streams natural path, they decided to have land parcels. So when there is a big rain event like what was experienced in the area February of 1999, there will definitely be a consequence.