Damage To Houses Research Articles

Establishment of flood damage function models: A case study in the Bago River Basin, Myanmar

This paper derives flood damage function models based on the relationships between flood inundation parameters and damage-aggravating factors for two land use categories: residential and agricultural. This case study considers the Bago River Basin in Myanmar, which is frequently damaged by flooding. A survey was conducted to determine the economic damage to affected populations and properties during a large flood in 2011. House damage, in-house damage, and income loss function models were established for residential areas, along with an agricultural damage function model. Flood water height, floor height from the ground, occurrence of landslide erosion and types of building materials could aggravate house damage, whereas in-house damage is exacerbated by flood water height above plinth level and types of house's plinth level. Income loss scales with flood duration, job category and household level. Flood water height, flood duration and the growth stage of paddies worsen agricultural damage. Knowing the relationship between flooding and its damaging factors, these models can be easily applied to a flood loss estimation model in further research.

Impact of 2015 earthquakes on a local hospital in Nepal: A prospective hospital-based study.

IntroductionNatural disasters pose a great challenge to the health systems and individual health facilities. In low-resource settings, disaster preparedness systems are often limited and not been well described. Two devastating earthquakes hit Nepal within a 17-days period in 2015. This study aims to describe the burden and distribution of emergency cases to a local hospital.MethodsThis is a prospective observational study of patients presenting to a local hospital for a period of 21 days following the earthquake on April 25, 2015. Demographic and clinical information was prospectively registered for all patients in the systematic emergency registry. Systematic telephone interviews were conducted in a random sample of the patients 90 days after admission to the hospital.ResultsA total of 2,003 emergency patients were registered during the period. The average daily number of emergency patients during the first five days was almost five times higher (n = 150) than the pre-incident daily average (n = 35). The majority of injuries were fractures (58%), 348 (56%) in the lower extremities. A total of 345 surgical procedures were performed and the hospital treated 111 patients with severe injuries related to the earthquake (compartment syndrome, crush injury, and internal injury). Among those with follow-up interviews, over 90% reported that they had been severely affected by the earthquakes; complete house damage, living in temporary shelter, or loss of close family member.ConclusionThe hospital experienced a very high caseload during the first days, and the majority of patients needed orthopaedic services. The proportion of severely injured and in-hospital deaths were relatively low, probably indicating that the most severely injured did not reach the hospital in time. The experiences underline the need for robust and easily available local health services that can respond to disasters.

Association between mild physical injury and psychological distress: Shichigahama Health Promotion Project

Objective Although a number of previous studies have investigated the association between natural disaster-related physical injury and mental health, very few have focused on mild physical injury. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between natural disaster-related mild physical injury and psychological distress in a cross-sectional study.Method This study is a part of the Shichigahama Health Promotion Project, which was conducted in cooperation with the Tohoku University and Shichigahama Town, Miyagi Prefecture, after the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE). We conducted the research about one year after the GEJE, and performed logistic regression analyses using 3,844 participants (1,821 males/2,023 females) aged 20 years or older, who answered all the questions on physical injuries and the Kessler 6 scale (K6), after adjusting for gender, age, social factors, and lifestyles. Psychological distress was defined as a K6 score ≥ 13 out of 24 points. We also investigated the effect of other disaster situations on the association between mild physical injury and psychological distress by stratifying the dataset by bereavement, witnessing someone's death, and house damage.Results The participants with physical injury were at a significantly higher risk of psychological distress, with an adjusted odds ratio (aOR) of 2.05 and 95% confidence interval (CI) of 1.26-3.34, than those uninjured. Additionally, the participants with mild physical injury were at a significantly higher risk of psychological distress (aOR=2.18, 95% CI=1.32-3.59). In the subgroup of participants with small-scale house damage, mild physical injury was significantly associated with psychological distress with an aOR of 4.01 and 95% CI of 2.03-7.93, whereas not in the subgroup of those with large-scale house damage, and a significant interaction was detected between mild physical injury and house damage.Conclusion We investigated the association between natural disaster-related physical injury and psychological distress in a cohort of approximately 4,000 residents in an area devastated by the GEJE. In this study, natural disaster-related physical injury was positively associated with psychological distress. The finding indicates that even mild physical injury can be an indicator of high risk for psychological distress.

Decision-Support Tool for Retrofitable Flood Resilience

Abstract Flooding is increasingly global challenge due to climate change and urban development practices. It can also be devastating to those affected. In the United Kingdom, it is projected that the number of people at high risk of flooding could rise from 1.5 to 3.5 million by 2080. Currently 400,000 homes and 75,000 businesses in England have an annual chance of flooding. In the UK, the Environment Agency provides useful information on flood risks for a given location. This information is supported with different guides by the local Councils on how to prepare for, and get help during flooding. What remains unclear and easy to access are customisable retrofit actions based on local flood risks, necessary for an individual or household to implement anticipatory retrofit actions, thereby improving the resilience of their homes. With this in mind, and knowing that studies about flood impacts focuses more on new construction or infrastructure solutions, this study aimed to provide a tangible solution to raise the awareness of people living in a flood area about the level of risk they are exposed to, and to aid decision-making about effective preventive solutions specifically designed for their house, in an autonomous way. The output is a decision-support tool developed to consolidate information about flood risks and present customised retrofit measures. The tool refers to the notions of damage and vulnerability of private housing to inform its operational diagnostic methodology. The output is a “to do list” of retrofitable work to increase resilience of the house against flood. 40 potential users evaluated and delivered positive feedback on the usefulness and functionality of the tool to raise awareness and improve resilience action. Future studies aim to fine-tune the tool and scale up the study.

Propuesta Metodológica para el Análisis de la Licuefacción de Suelos Asociada a Sismos Destrucutivos. Pre-Andes Centrales, Argentina (31º 30’ S y 68º 25’ O)

En este trabajo se evalua la susceptibilidad a la ocurrencia de procesos de licuefaccion de suelos asociados a sismos destructivos en el area ubicada al norte del rio San Juan. Los terremotos de 1894, 1944, 1952 y 1977 provocaron licuefaccion en el centro oeste de Argentina y particularmente en numerosos sitios de la provincia San Juan, resultando la zona norte del valle de Tulum, una de las mas afectadas. Los registros historicos de procesos de licuefaccion de suelos (PLS) ocurridos durante los terremotos mencionados, evidencian grietas, volcanes de arena, crateres y asentamientos diferenciales, los que ocasionaron importantes danos a las viviendas y al sector agro industrial de la region. En este estudio se efectuo un analisis de los factores principales que influyen en su ocurrencia, como tambien los efectos de la licuefaccion. Se evaluaron y ponderaron los factores condicionantes tales como origen y granulometria del deposito, edad de los depositos, profundidad del nivel freatico y registros historicos entre otros. Del analisis de los factores resulto un mapa asociado a una tabla evaluativa. La influencia de los factores en la evaluacion de la susceptibilidad se realizo mediante un proceso iterativo de superposicion de mapas. Una vez conseguida la combinacion optima se obtuvo un mapa final de susceptibilidad a la licuefaccion. La zonificacion lograda se relaciono a un indice de susceptibilidad (IS), catalogado cualitativamente como Muy Alto, Alto, Moderado y Bajo. Los resultados obtenidos permiten concluir que el sector medio del abanico aluvial del rio San Juan, donde se concentran los centros urbanos y la mayor actividad agropecuaria, es el sitio donde se exponen las condiciones de Muy Alta susceptibilidad, mientras que las de Alta susceptibilidad ocupan algunas zonas del sector medio-distal del abanico y las de Moderada a Baja se circunscriben al sector proximal del abanico.

Three-Stage Fuzzy Rule-Based Model for Earthquake Non-Engineered Building House Damage Hazard Determination

Indonesia is a country with a high earthquake intensity which brings significant impact on a lot of infrastructure damage, including building houses in every incident of a natural earthquake. The assessment model on earthquake damage with a fuzzy system has previously developed. It was aimed to assess the building damage rate after earthquake events, and it has a particular weakness on both the criteria used and the rate of model accuracy. The study was conducted to develop fuzzy inference model to determine the building damage hazard, especially for non-engineered building houses on a particular earthquake event (mitigation). The model was is a three-stage fuzzy rule-based model using a thousand data of building houses damaged as result of the impact of earthquake in Bener Meriah district, Aceh Province, Indonesia in the 2013 event, the peak ground acceleration (PGA) data, slope data extracted from 30 meters digital elevation model (DEM) and distance from major fault that was extracted from geological structure map. The main contribution of the research that has been done is to develop the function and fuzzy membership for each determinant variable of building house damage hazard and three stage fuzzy inference process to determine the building house damage hazard as an impact of an earthquake event. Using four hundred data of building houses damage as an impact of the earthquake at the same location, a three-stage fuzzy rule-based model that has been implemented in the study was proven to be able to determine the level of damaged building houses especially for non-engineered building houses better than the previous models with model performance by 93%.

Living in areas with different levels of earthquake damage and association with risk of cardiovascular disease: a cohort-linkage study

Cardiovascular disease rates are known to increase immediately after a severe earthquake. However, less is known about the magnitude of this increase over time in relation to the amount of housing damage. We assessed the effect of area housing damage from a major earthquake sequence in Christchurch, Canterbury province, New Zealand, on cardiovascular disease-related hospital admissions and deaths. For this cohort-linkage study, we used linked administrative datasets from the Statistics New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure to identify individuals aged 45 years or older living in Christchurch from the date of the first earthquake on Sept 4, 2010. Individuals were assigned the average damage level for their residential meshblock (small neighbourhood generally comprising 10-50 dwellings) using the insurance-assessed residential building damage costs obtained from the Earthquake Commission as a proportion of property value. We calculated the rates of cardiovascular disease-related hospital admissions (including myocardial infarction) and cardiovascular disease-related mortality and rate ratios (adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, small-area deprivation index, and personal income) by level of housing damage in the first year and the 4 subsequent years after the earthquake. The rate ratio association between earthquake housing damage and cardiovascular event was examined by Poisson regression, and linear test of trends across damage categories was done by regression modeling. We identified 179 000 residents living in the earthquake-affected region of Christchurch, of whom 148 000 had complete data. For the first 3 months after the Feb 22, 2011 earthquake, the Poisson regression-adjusted rate ratio (RR) for cardiovascular disease-related hospital admissions for residents from areas that were most damaged (compared with residents from the least damaged areas) was 1·12 (95% CI 0·96-1·32; test for linear trend p=0·239). In the first year after the earthquake sequence, for residents from areas that were most damaged (vs the least damaged areas), Poisson regression-adjusted RRs were 1·10 (1·01-1·21; test for linear trend p=0·068) for cardiovascular disease-related hospital admissions, 1·22 (1·00-1·48; p=0·036) for myocardial infarction-related hospital admissions, and 1·25 (1·06-1·47; p=0·105) for cardiovascular disease-related mortality, corresponding to an excess of 66 (95% CI 7-125) cardiovascular disease-related hospital admissions, including 29 (0-53) additional myocardial infarction-related hospital admissions and 46 (13-73) additional deaths from cardiovascular disease. In the 4 subsequent years, we found no evidence of an association of these outcomes with earthquake damage. Rates of cardiovascular disease and myocardial infarction were increased in people living in areas with more severely damaged homes in the first year after a major earthquake. Policy responses to reduce the effect of earthquake damage on cardiovascular disease could include pre-earthquake measures to minimise building damage, early wellbeing interventions within the first year to address post-earthquake stress, and enhanced provision of cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment services. Healthier Lives National Science Challenge and Natural Hazards Research Platform, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

Comorbidity of post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in flood survivors: Prevalence and shared risk factors.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety are both prevalent in trauma-related populations. However, comorbidity of these 2 psychiatric disorders has not been investigated in flood survivors. This study aimed to estimate the extent to which PTSD and anxiety co-occur in flood survivors, and identify shared risk factors for PTSD only and comorbidity of PTSD and anxiety.Individuals who experienced Dongting Lake flood in 1998 were enrolled in this study using stratified and systematic random sampling method. Information on social support, personality traits, PTSD, and anxiety was collected using self-report questionnaires. The intensity of exposure to the flood was measured by some questions. Logistic regression analyses were used to identify factors associated with PTSD only and comorbidity of PTSD and anxiety.In all, 325 participants were enrolled in this study. The prevalence of PTSD, anxiety, and comorbidity of PTSD and anxiety among survivors of the 1998 Dongting Lake flood at 17-year follow-up was 9.54%, 9.23%, and 6.15%, respectively. Furthermore, 64.52% of those with PTSD had anxiety and 66.67% of those with anxiety had PTSD. Loss of relative, injury of body, damage of house, and emotional instability were shared risk factors for PTSD only and comorbidity of PTSD and anxiety, in comparison with neither PTSD nor anxiety.Post-traumatic stress disorder only and comorbidity of PTSD and anxiety are prevalent in flood survivors, and are both related to the intensity of exposure to the flood and personality traits, indicating that integrated intervention strategies of PTSD and anxiety for flood survivors are needed.

Heartaches over housing: correlating cardiovascular disease rates and housing damage in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes

Heartaches over housing: correlating cardiovascular disease rates and housing damage in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes

FLOOD HAZARD MAPPING OF BOGOWONTO RIVER IN PURWOREJO REGENCY, CENTRAL JAVA PROVINCE

The overflowing discharge of Bogowonto River in Purworejo Regency, Central Java flooded the surrounding area during the rainy season. A huge amount of losses such as damage of infrastructures, housing, and agricultural area occurs every year. This research mainly aims to develop flood hazard map and study the characteristics of flood in the study area. There are two main analysis; hydrologic and hydraulic, to model a flood event. Hydrologic and hydraulic modelling of flood based on 20 and 50- years return period hydrograph along the river geometryis done using the latest HEC program namely HEC- HMS 4.1 and HECRAS 5.0. Also, ArcGIS 10.3 is used as a terrain pre-processor and post-processor for hazard mapping. The results of this research are flood hazard maps for 20 and 50 years flood and its comparison to the recent major flood events. Flood inundation modelled covered an area of 993.77 Ha and 1,175.86 Ha, with maximum discharge calculated at Boro Weir as starting point are 1206.2 m3/s and 1,397.3 m3/s for 20 and 50 years flood case, respectively.

Association between housing type and γ-GTP increase after the Great East Japan Earthquake

BackgroundIt has been reported that alcohol consumption increases after natural disasters, with an impact on health. However, the impact of relocation upon drinking behavior has been unclear. The aim of this study was to clarify the association between housing type and the impact of alcohol consumption on health after the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) of 2011. MethodsWe analyzed 569 residents living in devastated areas of Ishinomaki city, who had undergone assessment of their γ-GTP levels at health check-ups in both 2010 and 2013, and had given details of the type of housing they occupied in 2013. The housing types were categorized into five groups: “same housing as that before the GEJE”, “prefabricated temporary housing”, “privately rented temporary housing/rental housing”, “homes of relatives”, and “reconstructed housing”. We used fixed-effect regression analysis to examine the association between housing type after the GEJE and changes in γ-GTP after adjustment for age, BMI, housing damage, number of people in household, smoking status, presence of illness, psychological distress, and social network. ResultsThe mean age of the participants was 71.5 years and 46.2% of them were men. The proportion of individuals who drank heavily, and suffered from psychological distress and insomnia, was highest among those living in privately rented temporary housing/rental housing. Compared with individuals who continued to occupy the same housing as those before the GEJE, the effect of change in γ-GTP was significantly higher in individuals who had moved to privately rented temporary housing/rental housing (b = 9.5, SE = 4.4, p < 0.05). ConclusionOur present findings reveal that disaster victims who have moved to privately rented temporary housing/rental housing are at highest risk of negative health effects due to alcohol drinking.

Numerical investigation on effects of thermophysical properties on fluid flow in hydraulic retarder

Recognizing the faultiness of ignoring that thermophysical properties of transmission medium varied with the temperature, a comparative assessment of two cases was performed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method in capturing braking performance, internal flow field and fluid structure interaction for hydraulic retarder. The case considering the variation of thermophysical properties greatly improved the prediction accuracy due to the simulation conditions closer to experiment. Braking torque could be increased because of the enlargement of density and the reduction of viscosity, while there was no obvious effect on braking performance for specific heat and thermal conductivity. For internal flow field, the enlargement of density and the reduction of viscosity together lead to an increase in velocity, which in turn resulted in an increase in pressure, then the reduction of viscosity could suppress the generation of vortices reflected by the decrease in vorticity, which could positively reduce the energy loss near the wall. Finally, a comparative analysis between fluid structure interaction (FSI) and thermal fluid structure interaction (TFSI) was conducted. The results indicated that the deformation and equivalent stress significantly increased compared with original simulation conditions due to the presence of thermal stress, which obviously increased the stress damage of hydraulic retarder housing.

DAMPAK PERTAMBANGAN TERHADAP LINGKUNGAN HIDUP DI KALIMANTAN SELATAN DAN IMPLIKASINYA BAGI HAK-HAK WARGA NEGARA

The legal issues in this paper is about the mining activities increasingly uncontrollable that cause various effects for society and the life around of mine, including: environmental demage, high of pollution (soil, water and air) and resulting in disruption to the wide of society such as damage of houses and public facilities, mainly by the action of blasting dynamite to open the mine site. Disruption aspects of community life, when the viewed of side of Human Rights, which is mainly related to economic rights, social and cultural, surely very related to the impact of this coal mining. Because of human rights involve aspects the right of life and good life, safe and healthy which is the right to a good environment, healthy and regulated in the laws of the republic Indonesia of 1945. Keywords: Mining, Environment, Environmental Damage and Human Rights

Effects of site conditions on earthquake ground motion and their applications in seismic design in loess region

The Loess Plateau is an earthquake prone region of China, where the effects of loess deposit on ground motion were discovered during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (Ms8.0) and the 2013 Minxian-Zhangxian earthquake (Ms6.6). The field investigations, observations, and analyses indicated that large number of casualties and tremendous economic losses were caused not only by collapse and damage of houses with poor seismic performance, landslides, but also amplification effects of site conditions, topography and thickness of loess deposit, on ground motion. In this paper, we chose Dazhai Village and Majiagou Village as the typical loess site affected by the two earthquakes for intensity evaluation, borehole exploration, temporary strong motion array, micro tremor survey, and numerical analysis. The aim is to explore the relations between amplification factors and site conditions in terms of topography and thickness of loess deposit. We also developed site amplification factors of ground motion for engineering design consideration at loess sites. The results showed that the amplification effects are more predominant with increase in thickness of loess deposit and slope height. The amplification may increase seismic intensity by 1 degree, PGA and predominant period by 2 times, respectively.

Mitigation of disasters through community cohesion

Mitigation of disasters through community cohesion

Social capital and cognitive decline in the aftermath of a natural disaster: a natural experiment from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

We examined prospectively whether social capital mitigates the adverse effects of natural disaster on cognitive decline. The baseline for our study was established seven months before the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in a survey of older community-dwelling adults who lived 80 kilometers west of the epicenter (59.0% response rate). Approximately two and a half years after the disaster, the follow-up survey gathered information about personal experiences of disaster as well as incidence of cognitive disability (82.1% follow-up rate). Our primary outcome was cognitive disability (measured on an 8-level scale) assessed by in-home assessment. The experience of housing damage was associated with risk of cognitive impairment (coefficient = 0.04, 95% confidence interval: 0.02 to 0.06). Factor analysis of our analytic sample (n = 3,566) established two sub-scales of social capital: a cognitive dimension (perceptions of community social cohesion) and a structural dimension (informal socializing and social participation). Fixed effects regression showed that informal socializing and social participation buffered the risk of cognitive decline resulting from housing damage. Informal socializing and social participation may prevent cognitive impairment following natural disaster. National Institutes of Health (R01AG042463-04), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Adverse childhood experiences, exposure to a natural disaster and posttraumatic stress disorder among survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami.

To investigate whether adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) modify the impact of exposure to a natural disaster (the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami) on the occurrence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among older people. Data were collected as part of the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES), which is an on-going epidemiological survey investigating social determinants of health among older people across Japan. Information on PTSD symptoms based on the Screening Questionnaire for Disaster Mental Health, traumatic exposure to the earthquake (i.e., house damage and loss of relatives/friends during the earthquake/tsunami) and ACEs was obtained from 580 participants aged 65 or older living in Iwanuma City, Miyagi Prefecture, which suffered severe damage as a result of the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami in March 2011. Associations were examined using Poisson regression analysis with a robust variance estimator after adjusting for covariates. The prevalence of PTSD was 9.7% in this population; compared to those with no traumatic experience, the prevalence of PTSD was approximately two times higher among those who experienced the loss of close friends/relatives (PR = 1.84, 95% CI = 1.11-3.03, p = 0.018), or whose house was damaged (PR = 2.15, 95% CI = 1.07-4.34, p = 0.032). ACE was not significantly associated with PTSD. Stratified analyses by the presence of ACE showed that damage due to the earthquake/tsunami was associated with PTSD only among those without ACEs; more specifically, among non-ACE respondents the PR of PTSD associated with house damage was 6.67 (95% CI = 1.66-26.80), while for the loss of a relative or a close friend it was 3.56 (95% CI = 1.18-10.75). In contrast, no statistically significant associations were observed among those with ACEs. Following the Great East Japan earthquake/tsunami in 2011 a higher risk of developing PTSD symptoms was observed in 2013 especially among older individuals without ACEs. This suggests that ACEs might affect how individuals respond to subsequent traumatic events later in life.

Are Lowered Socioeconomic Circumstances Causally Related to Tooth Loss? A Natural Experiment Involving the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

Oral health status is correlated with socioeconomic status. However, the causal nature of the relationship is not established. Here we describe a natural experiment involving deteriorating socioeconomic circumstances following exposure to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We investigated the relationship between subjective economic deterioration and housing damage due to the disaster and tooth loss in a cohort of community-dwelling residents (n=3,039), from whom we obtained information about socioeconomic status and health status in 2010 (i.e., predating the disaster). A follow-up survey was performed in 2013 (postdisaster), and 82.1% of the 4,380 eligible survivors responded. We estimated the impact of subjective economic deterioration and housing damage due to the disaster on tooth loss by fitting an instrumental variable probit model. Subjective economic deterioration and housing damage due to the disaster were significantly associated with 8.1% and 1.7% increases in the probability of tooth loss (probit coefficients were 0.469 (95% confidence interval: 0.065, 0.872) and 0.103 (95% confidence interval: 0.011, 0.196), respectively). In this natural experiment, we confirmed the causal relationship between deteriorating socioeconomic circumstances and tooth loss.

Reducing depressive symptoms after the Great East Japan Earthquake in older survivors through group exercise participation and regular walking: a prospective observational study

ObjectivesSurvivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake have an increased risk of depressive symptoms. We sought to examine whether participation in group exercise and regular walking could mitigate the...

LANDSLIDE IN NACHTERSTEDT OF GERMANY

On July 18, 2009, an important landslide occurred in Nachterstedt City toward to the artificial Concordia Lake, which was created, in 1994, at the place of an old coal mine, at the edge of the city. The area is located to North-East of Harz, between the cities of Aschersleben and Quedlingburg. An underground coal mine is responsible for this damage which caused the damage of a privet house and a big building. Three people were also died. The mine apparently closed in 1991 whereupon it was converted into a recreation area. The landslide was caused by the increase of the groundwater level, in the coal mine, after a heavy rain, in relation to the water level of the lake.