Abstract
People living in areas of significant seismic risk seldom undertake sufficient preparations to safeguard their families. This is most problematic in remote communities such as those along the Dead Sea Fault, Israel, where self-reliance is a key factor in coping with disasters. To facilitate individual and familial involvement in earthquake preparedness in remote areas, we designed a tool for self-assessment of risk and preparedness. The personalized risk assessment is based on national hazard and building standards, and on personal input regarding structure characteristics. The risk and preparedness evaluations enhance awareness and provide immediate feedback to help users improve familial preparedness. The spatial analysis of the data collected is used to form high-resolution maps that expose specific challenges for emergency responses. A study conducted in the town of Mitzpe Ramon exposed neighborhoods with a relatively high risk of damage and low preparedness. Integrating these results with seasonal stress-factors such as peak tourism and extreme weather, provides new and important insights into the ability of the local community and emergency forces to cope with multihazard situations. An analysis of the heterogeneous distribution of expected hardship within a community should be implemented worldwide to improve risk mitigation.
Highlights
IntroductionCommunity Resilience—The Challenge of Activating People to Improve Self-Reliance
These results suggest that mapping the selfevaluation results of preparedness and expected damage at the neighborhood level may be used to identify areas of high and low community resilience within towns and cities
For this we first compare risk evaluations for selected house types that typify numerous neighborhoods in peripheral towns in Israel (Table 2), and we focus on defining the risk and preparedness levels of the main neighborhoods of Mitzpe Ramon
Summary
Community Resilience—The Challenge of Activating People to Improve Self-Reliance. While natural hazards, such as earthquakes, cannot be controlled or avoided, there are ways to minimize their impact on society. The first steps to successful public engagement are the dissemination and clarification of risks, and a demonstration of the proper behavior during and following an earthquake [9,10,11]. Such engagement hopefully leads to informed, predictable and productive behavior of readied individuals and emergency response teams [12,13]
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