Abstract
When is it safe, or at least, not unreasonably risky, to undertake fieldwork on active volcanoes? Volcano observatories must balance the safety of staff against the value of collecting field data and/or manual instrument installation, maintenance, and repair. At times of volcanic unrest this can present a particular dilemma, as both the value of fieldwork (which might help save lives or prevent unnecessary evacuation) and the risk to staff in the field may be high. Despite the increasing coverage and scope of remote monitoring methods, in-person fieldwork is still required for comprehensive volcano monitoring, and can be particularly valuable at times of volcanic unrest. A volcano observatory has a moral and legal duty to minimise occupational risk for its staff, but must do this in a way that balances against this its duty to provide the best possible information in support of difficult decisions on community safety.To assist with consistent and objective decision-making regarding whether to undertake fieldwork on active volcanoes, we present the Volcano Life Risk Estimator (VoLREst). We developed VoLREst to quantitatively evaluate life-safety risk to GNS Science staff undertaking fieldwork on volcanoes in unrest where the primary concerns are volcanic hazards from an eruption with no useful short-term precursory activity that would indicate an imminent eruption. The hazards considered are ballistics, pyroclastic density currents, and near-vent processes. VoLREst quantifies the likelihood of exposure to volcanic hazards at various distances from the vent for small, moderate, or large eruptions. This, combined with the estimate of the chance of a fatality given exposure to a volcanic hazard, provides VoLREst’s final output: quantification of the hourly risk of a fatality for an individual at various distances from the volcanic vent.At GNS Science, the calculated levels of life-safety risk trigger different levels of managerial approval required to undertake fieldwork. Although an element of risk will always be present when conducting fieldwork on potentially active volcanoes, this is a first step towards providing objective and reproducible guidance for go/no go decisions for access to undertake volcano monitoring.
Highlights
Volcano observatories face a challenge: balancing the need to monitor volcanoes to the best of their ability to provide adequate information and advice to crisis management officials and/or the public with the need to keep observatory staff safe whilst collecting time critical data
pyroclastic density current (PDC) and ballistics are considered the main source of risk to staff, and are the two volcanic hazards we focus on for our life-safety risk evaluation
When is it too dangerous to undertake fieldwork on active volcanoes? What is the balance between keeping observatory staff safe and the necessity for staff to undertake critical data collection to better understand the state of a volcano? While we do not have simple black and white answers to these questions, our conclusions are that it is possible a) to make sensible reproducible quantitative estimates of risk to staff involved in field data collection on volcanoes at times of unrest, and b) to use such risk estimates to enable management to make better-informed ‘go/no-go’ decisions for fieldwork to proceed
Summary
Volcano observatories face a challenge: balancing the need to monitor volcanoes to the best of their ability to provide adequate information and advice to crisis management officials and/or the public with the need to keep observatory staff safe whilst collecting time critical data. Even in this era of increased remote monitoring capabilities, such as real-time data telemetry of ground instrumentation and satellite imagery, there remains a need for fieldwork near or on active volcanoes (note: in this paper an ‘active’ volcano is in a state of detectable unrest or erupting). Even if a volcano is in detectable unrest, eruptions may occur with no useful precursory activity indicating an eruption is imminent
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