• No place to escape
• Hazard and disaster
• What is a hazard?
• Types of hazard?
• What is the difference between hazards and disasters?
• Why risk it?
• Choice tree
• Enquire, decide, act

There is danger everywhere. Hazards of various kinds and degrees abound.

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Dr Mark Monmonier, a geographer from Syracuse University, has recently written a book, Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Hazards in America which describes and locates a wide range of hazards in the United States of America. As well as plotting the natural hazards one usually considers like earthquakes, mud slides and hurricanes he includes technological, human induced, hazards such as crime and nuclear leaks.

Figure 1 Catamaran going to rescue people from Matupit Island alongside the erupting Mt Tavurur (Rabaul, PNG) in September 1994.

By the time he has mapped so many hazards it is plain that virtually nowhere in the United States of America is safe. A major point shown by his maps is that people take risks, sometimes carefully considered, by erecting buildings for homes, factories, commerce, recreation or utilities in vulnerable places like flood plains or near active volcanoes (See Figure 1). He cites the flood plains and low-lying regions of Louisiana and Florida and the state of Washington as risky for these reasons.

Dr Monmonier draws particular attention to the state of California for which he catalogues myriad hazards. As well as the obvious earthquakes, wild-fires, mud slides and 'tidal' waves he includes the technological hazards of smog, freeway snipers, urban riots, oil spills and the grave threat of thirst from increasing scarcity of sufficient potable water. Dr Monmonier has written a brief, lively essay called "Ten Risky Places" which uses examples from the book.

Similar maps could be drawn for Australia and South Australia.

Emergency Management Australia (EMA) provides such maps for Australia, although these are mainly for natural hazards. The risk zone maps for the volcanic hazard on Montserrat are good examples.Whereas old style text books largely dealt with disasters, usually natural, and their aftermath a recent school text entitled Hazards (Manuel/ McElroy/Smith : 1997) encourages an up-to-date treatment of the subject and an approach to study that mirrors modern emergency management. These activities follow the style of that book and uses examples from it at times. It recognizes a similar range of natural and technological hazards to those in Cartographies of Danger, distinguishes hazards from disasters and promotes an understanding of how hazardous events can become disasters, vulnerability assessed, risks reduced, emergencies can be managed, and dangers avoided.

Similarly the new approach of the EMA, which focuses on emergency management, emphasizes the need to assess vulnerability. A major aspect of vulnerability assessment is the geographical concept of adjacency.

Hazardous waist The Heart Foundation poster (See Figure 2) introduces the concept of a hazard very well. This hazard is not yet the problem, but may well lead to disaster. This introduces a range of related ideas including hazard, disaster, risk, danger, vulnerability, and emergency.   Bigger image Return to index

Environmental events, such as river flooding and earthquakes, occur naturally and are normally only considered hazardous in relation to the human usage of particular places. A hazard therefore is some event or object that is a potential source of harm to human life, health, income or possessions. A hazard may also threaten people's built structures or other aspects of the biophysical environment. It is not only natural phenomena that can prove hazardous to people, but also some human activities can cause disasters.

Hazards do not always develop into disasters such as the volcanic eruption at Rabaul. This paper encourages students to examine many ways in which disaster can be avoided or reduced during hazardous events, but it does not try to explain in detail the processes that cause the hazards as there are already many good books that do this.

It is common to distinguish between five broad groupings of hazards.

At an initial glance it would seem that the first four groupings could be termed natural while the last be appropriately termed human. However, deeper analysis of the examples that can be attributed to the first four groupings would indicate that some hazards have been accentuated by other things such as the actions, locations and preparedness of people. For example, droughts are not always solely atmospherically induced nor are landslides and avalanches solely geologically related nor are bushfires solely biologically attributable. In all of these examples people can have amajor influence on the hazard.

A disaster is a calamity which befalls people, their buildings, livelihood and belongings and/or the environment of a place as the result of a hazardous event.

When a hazardous event occurs people are faced with an emergency which may become a disaster unless a rapid and effective response prevents or modifies the impact of that event. Hazards usually turn into disasters only when people occupy the space affected by that hazard. The people and their property located on the flood plain of a river are the most likely to be threatened by a flood of that river, as are market gardeners by frost, ski resorts by avalanches and mud slides, the rangeland ecology and pastoral industry by feral goats, or suburban residents by the accidental release of toxic gases. People obviously believe that the benefits of living and working on or near the site of a potential hazard is worth the risk.

In most places around the world disasters are qualitatively and quantitatively different to emergencies. Disasters demand enormous commitment of people, money and physical resources from governments, non government and voluntary agencies over considerable periods of time while emergencies tend to involve few people and resources over a limited period of time.

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Risk is properly assessed as a relationship between the hazardous event, the resource which attracts people, and the circumstances under which the hazard may become a disaster. (See Figure 3)

Why are people there? Why do they take the risks? For many it is where they were born and have neither the wealth nor knowledge necessary to move. For many it is where their livelihood is. Even if a place that has an environmental hazard such as a dormant volcano, occasional hurricane or flooding, people will still frequently take the chance of living, building and working there because that place also has a resource that they reckon makes the risk worthwhile. (See Figure 4)

A resource is anything that people value because they have a use for it. For example, it may be a patch of ground on which they can grow food or build a house. People may risk living adjacent to a freeway (motorway) to take advantage of the rapid access it provides even though there may be hazards from vehicles or the pollution caused by the traffic. Despite the well recognized bushfire hazard they may live in the hills behind major cities like Los Angeles, Melbourne or Adelaide because of the idyllic setting.

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The degree of risk describes vulnerability and varies according to location and the magnitude of the hazard. Young children frequently seek a piece of hard flat land upon which to hit a tennis ball. Despite the common traffic hazard they could choose a major highway, a busy street, their quiet neighbourhood cul-de-sac, or the drive way at their home. The main consideration is the difference between the major traffic hazard on the highway and the increasingly lesser dangers of the others. It would obviously be stupid for children to play on the highway where they would be very vulnerable, but even the limited traffic in the home drive has harmed children at play. The degree of risk relates not only to the intensity of the hazard, but also to the part of the human use system at risk. We rate the risk far greater if it relates to human life or health. Threats by a hazard to property owned by human beings leads to a higher risk rating than threats to other parts of the biophysical environment.

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Risk assessment is usually made according to the chance of an hazardous event and its likely focus. (See Figure 5) The EMA defines risk as the concept used to give meaning to things, forces or circumstances that pose danger to people or to what they value. Descriptions of risk are typically stated in terms of the likelihood of harm or loss from a hazard. Risk management therefore involves policies, procedures and practices of monitoring, identifying, analyzing, evaluating and acting to reduce risk.

Figure 5 - Risk: chance and focus

The stages of emergency management and disaster response involve the parallel activities of gathering information and administrative planning through the stages of pre-disaster planning, preparedness, response, and recovery and reconstruction. A useful flow chart explaining these steps can be found in Figure 1.18 of Hazards (Manuel/McElroy/Smith:1997).

The EMA define vulnerability as the degree of susceptibility and resilience of the community and environment to hazards. Assessment involves appreciating the characteristics of a community or system in terms of its capacity to anticipate, cope with and recover from events.

People are attracted to live or work near hazards for many reasons and given good information about the nature and frequency of the risk are able to make decisions about how they will respond to that risk. The choice tree of responses to hazards (See Figure 6) suggests three main kinds of response involving change of location or human use, reducing losses by modifying the event or preventing effects, or accepting losses by bearing them or sharing them with others.

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Figure 6 - Hazards: A choice tree of responses

It is not easy to find places that are free from all risk, but some places obviously make one more vulnerable than others. (See Figure 7)

Figure 7 - Seismicity: This computer simulated model plots a range of characteristics of seismic activity. It shows how vulnerable are people who live around the edges of the great tectonic plates.

The process of decision-making and subsequent action requires people to gather the information necessary to make good decisions and to act wisely. Finding out and making decisions are essential before doing anything. In the case of decisions in response to hazards one must understand the nature of an issue.

Issues arise whenever there are conflicting opinions about anything. There may be a tension between different proposed responses such as permanently evacuating a city destroyed by a volcano as opposed to rebuilding on the same site. This conflict is the basis of all issues and requires us to carefully examine the opinions and motives of every person involved in the issue.

All stakeholders have a vested interest of some kind which we need to understand in making our judgements. We also need to examine the varying degrees of power that people have in responding. For instance the very poor who were forced from their land by the eruption of Mt Pinatubo have a different and very limited range of options compared to the wealthy of the district.

The Issues questions below for which we seek answers are fairly self-explanatory and provide a very useful model for tackling an issue of hazard response and management.

Issues questions

• What prompts our interest in this issue?
• What is the issue?
• What is at this place and why?
• Where are the human and/or environmental phenomena of this place located precisely?
• Who uses this place?
• Who is involved in the issue?
• How and why has the issue arisen? What conflicts are involved in this issue?
• When do these events mostly occur there? (Chronology/sequence)
• What alternative decisions can be made? What impacts would each have?
• How is the issue likely to be resolved? How should be issue be resolved?
• How would you respond? How would you justify this response?

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