Small-scale Disasters Research Articles

Identifying and classifying broader scale of disaster impacts to better inform disaster management policies and practice

AbstractDisasters are often assessed by factors such as their magnitude, severity and impact on affected communities. Typically, disaster management policies are largely informed by learnings from large-scale disasters. Many studies, however, have shown that cumulative smaller scale disaster impacts have similar outcomes comparable to larger scale disasters. This indirectly contributes to a lack of consistency in and paucity of data related to both smaller-scale disasters and their associated cumulative impacts. This paper argues that greater attention needs to be paid to collecting disaster impact data on a range of disaster-scale events along with their cumulative impacts to better inform disaster management policies and practice. The paper aims to test the hypothesis that a better understanding of a wide range of disaster scale types and their impacts on communities, including small-scale disasters, enables the development of more just, consistent and equitable disaster management policies and practice. Analysing economic costs, evacuation and rainfall data from past flood events that affected Aotearoa-New Zealand over the last three decades, the paper found discrepancies and lack of coherence in disaster data collection and reporting, along with a predominant reliance on rainfall intensity data for disaster risk reduction and planning. The findings also confirmed the importance of identifying economic damages for a range of disaster scales, including those from small-scale disasters. This highlights the need for developing a spectrum to better classify and identify disaster impacts based on various spatial and temporal contexts. The paper concludes by affirming that such database would provide much needed evidence for developing a methodology that enables the identification of the level of disaster impacts; thereby guiding the implementation of more just, consistent and equitable disaster management policies and practice.

Critical Entities Resilience Assessment (CERA) to small-scale disasters

Since 2022, there has been a significant increase in the importance of critical entities in terms of critical infrastructure protection. The adoption of the Critical Entities Resilience Directive must in EU member states ensure not only the protection of critical infrastructure, but also a sufficient resilience level of the entities themselves. This directive obliges critical entities to take measures to increase their resilience but does not provide any methodological support. A necessary starting point for fulfilling this obligation is knowledge of the current state of critical entities resilience to small-scale disasters. The results of the resilience assessment will then enable critical entities to identify vulnerabilities on the basis of which adequate technical, security and organisational measures can be defined. Therefore, this article presents an entirely new semi-quantitative method, CERA, which has been developed for the comprehensive assessment of entity and infrastructure resilience of critical entities. At the core of this method is a procedure that allows critical entities to self-assess their internal resilience through individual factors, which are defined in detail in this article. In order to facilitate the assessment process, the authors of the article have created the CERA Support Tool, which is supplementary material to this article. The Results section of the article also includes a presentation of a practical application example of the proposed procedure.

County-scale dataset indicating the effects of disasters on crops in Taiwan from 2003 to 2022

A lack of crop disaster datasets has limited the exploration of the influence of small-scale disasters on crops. Because disasters are often defined on the basis of human impact, disaster databases may underestimate the effect of disasters on crop production. Additionally, the resolution of such databases is insufficient for evaluating the effects of disasters on small areas. In this study, crop disaster and daily weather datasets covering the period from 2003 to 2022 in Taiwan were developed. Total 9,245 damage records from 233 observations of crop disasters were mined from the Report on Crop Production Loss Caused by Disasters of Taiwan. Daily weather data were collected from weather stations. Entire crop disaster information including multiple disasters, crops, and affected regions was stored in crop disaster dataset. All datasets were cleaned up and refined to enhance their quality, and characteristics such as disaster and crop classification were added to enhance the applicability of these datasets. These datasets can be used to determine the relationship between disaster type and crop production losses.

The Noah's Ark effect: Radicalization of social meanings of disaster preparedness in communities facing a major disaster

This study proposed and demonstrated the “Noah's Ark” effect, a concept wherein major disaster scenarios generate radical engagement in disaster preparedness within local communities as opposed to the “cry wolf” effect. The study setting was the town of Kuroshio in Kochi Prefecture, Japan, where a large tsunami was expected to hit, according to the Cabinet Office's New Estimation in March 2012. The study quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed Japanese newspaper articles on “disaster prevention” in Kuroshio through text mining and performed a comparison between the tsunami disaster caused by the Tohoku Earthquake and the expected tsunami devastation in other areas. The results revealed that the Noah's Ark effect is characterized by five features: (1) increasing disaster preparedness issues to the same level as those in tsunami-affected areas; (2) focusing on preventing a disaster or hazard (disaster as an event) rather than preparing for issues brought about by a disaster (disaster as a process); (3) involving gradual shifts rather than sudden changes observed in the affected areas (4) resident voluntary action (e.g., evacuation training); rather than dependence on government measures; and (5) promoting and simplifying specific issues. In regard to the negative impact of disaster forecast and estimation, the findings suggest the need to consider not only the cry-wolf effect, which applies to high-frequency but small-scale disasters (e.g., floods), but also the Noah's Ark effect, which applies to low-frequency but large-scale disasters (e.g., tsunamis).

The day after the disaster: Risk-taking following large- and small-scale disasters in a microworld

AbstractUsing data from seven microworld experiments (N = 841), we investigated how participants reacted to simulated disasters with different risk profiles in a microworld. Our central focus was to investigate how the scale of a disaster affected the choices and response times of these reactions. We find that one-off large-scale disasters prompted stronger reactions to move away from the affected region than recurrent small-scale adverse events, despite the overall risk of a disaster remaining constant across both types of events. A subset of participants are persistent risk-takers who repeatedly put themselves in harm’s way, despite having all the experience and information required to avoid a disaster. Furthermore, while near-misses prompted a small degree of precautionary movement to reduce one’s subsequent risk exposure, directly experiencing the costs of the disaster substantially increased the desire to move away from the affected region. Together, the results point to ways in which laboratory risk-taking tasks can be used to inform the kinds of communication and interventions that seek to mitigate people’s exposure to risk.

Relating root causes to local risk conditions: A comparative study of the institutional pathways to small-scale disasters in three urban flood contexts

The continued rise of global disaster losses pushes our attention yet further to the causal factors that drive risks, beyond the frame of standardised risk assessment models. A key gap in our understanding of the causality of disasters remains establishing how spatially and temporally distant factors – ‘root causes’ – drive local risk conditions. This is particularly the case for small-scale but high-impact disasters. It includes understanding the role that institutions play in influencing such pathways of risk production. This paper addresses this question using a holistic approach to risk analysis that links past drivers to contemporary conditions. We apply this in three case studies of coastal flood management in urban areas of differential size and integration within the European Union - Rethymno (Crete), Genoa (Italy) and St Maarten (Dutch Caribbean). The paper reveals the importance of local institutions in mediating the impacts of higher-level economic and political changes on local risks. It provides new empirical evidence of the relationship between austerity, institutional reform and local disaster risk reduction. The analysis supports a stronger causal epistemology of resilience to disasters but also leads to re-consideration of the institutional entry points for risk reduction, and the importance of considering context and trade-offs.

Impact of Japanese Post-Disaster Temporary Housing Areas' (THAs) Design on Mental and Social Health.

The phenomenon named kodokushi, meaning death alone without the care or company of anyone inside temporary housing, appeared after the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995 with some 250 cases. This paper analyzes the evolution of Japanese temporary houses—to attempt to prevent the problem of kodokushi—from the point of view of management, how services and activities are organized, and design. We will use case studies as our methodological tool, analyzing the responses in 1995 Kobe (50,000 THs), 2004 Chūetsu (3000 THs), 2011 Tōhoku (50,000 THs), and 2016 Kumamoto (4000 THs). This article shows how the Japanese THAs follow a single design that has undergone very little variation in the last 25 years, a design which promotes the social isolation of their residents, making recovery—from the psychological perspective—and helping the most vulnerable members of society, more difficult. In small scale disasters (Chūetsu) applying organization and management measures was able to correct the problems caused by design and there were no cases of kodokushi: in large-scale disasters (Tōhoku), however, the difficulties to implement the same measures resulted in the reappearance of new cases at rates similar to Kobe’s. Our main conclusion is that the design of Japanese THAs must be reconsidered and changed to respond to the real needs of the most vulnerable groups.

Comparison of Global Databases for Disaster Loss and Damage Data

After the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction is adopted, a global database as a tool to monitor disaster loss and damage databases is required. Several disaster loss and damage databases are in use globally. This paper aims to explore how the existing databases vary in three aspects of threshold, spatial resolution, and data quality control, as well as the limitations of the existing databases. We review previous studies comparing the existing global databases and extract the differences and limitations. The threshold of EM-DAT is clear, but its threshold results in ignoring small-scale disasters that DesInventar captures. The differences in disaster threshold create different pictures of disaster losses and/or risks. Regarding spatial resolution, only DesInventar provides disaster impact data at a municipal level, while others provide information at a country level. The limitations of the existing global database are categorized into four aspects, as follows: lack of disaggregated data, limited spatial coverage and resolution, insufficiency of completeness and reliability of data, and insufficient information on indirect loss. The implication from our findings is that, in order to complement the limitations of the existing disaster loss databases to use for decision making on disaster risk reduction, the following are required: cross-checking of data across different databases; complementary disaster loss data; and collection of an exhaustive and firsthand dataset with a transparent and internationally consistent methodology by policy makers.

Beyond the Sendai indicators: Application of a cascading risk lens for the improvement of loss data indicators for slow-onset hazards and small-scale disasters

The implementation of the Sendai Framework offers an opportunity for expanding the global application of standardized loss accounting systems for recording disaster impacts. However, the Sendai indicators and existing global disaster databases offer limited utility in achieving the aims of the Sendai Framework through the creation of a knowledge base relevant for informed risk reduction strategies in varied hazard and vulnerability contexts. Using cascading analyses and systems thinking, this paper explores new approaches for improving methodologies for loss and damage data. It focuses on the subset of small-scale disasters and slow-onset hazards, and demonstrates how a systems approach to cascading risk can improve the utility of disaster databases from reactive and static measures of economic loss, to tools for assessing risk and vulnerability across temporal and spatial scales.

Micro Disasters: The Case of Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Disasters are commonly experienced as major devastating events that exceed the resources of an agency to respond, with effects emanating throughout a community or region. There are, however, those events that are more measured, more subtle, and with few actual deaths, which still distract investigators from their daily duties and routines and project long lasting and crippling effects to a community or nation. Disasters can occur from natural forces or be the result of human activity. Most forensic pathologists who practice over a significant time will encounter one or the other types of disaster, sometimes more than a few. In my own career, I have witnessed large-scale disasters, such as hundreds of deaths occurring as the result of a major heat wave, to small-scale disasters such as factory explosions or small airplane crashes at sea-each with their own challenges. In addition to the extent of the initial disaster, many require the detailed, exhaustive evidentiary recovery and examination of a crime scene. The Jeffrey Dahmer case, although only involving 11 actual victims, required a major disaster response, and continues to influence and affect a community over 25 years later.

From state agencies to ordinary citizens: reframing risk-mitigation investments and their impact to disrupt urban risk traps in Lima, Peru

The understanding of linkages between disaster risk and urban development has seen important advances in recent decades. However, it falls short in addressing the production and reproduction of so-called urban “risk traps”, which are accumulation cycles of everyday risks and small-scale disasters with highly localized impacts, particularly on impoverished urban dwellers. Drawing on the action-research project cLIMA sin Riesgo, this paper examines risk-mitigating investment actions of state agencies, residents and communities in Barrios Altos, in the historic centre of Lima, Peru, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the periphery. The analysis shows that residents tend to be caught in risk traps not necessarily due to lacking investments, but paradoxically despite them and their unintended effects. Furthermore, accumulated fragmented investments erode the capacity to act of those at risk and perpetuate risk accumulation cycles. The paper argues for a re-assessment of risk-mitigation investments and their intended and unintended consequences, and suggests routes to address current shortcomings in order to disrupt “risk traps”.

Hidden disasters: Recurrent flooding impacts on educational continuity in the Philippines

This study provides insights on the impacts of both large and small-scale floods in the education sector of Metro Manila, Philippines and how they may contribute in Global Leaning Crisis. It highlights the impacts of small-scale floods which are often unrecognised as they fail to meet the very definition of disaster with the widest global consensus. The methodological framework for this study consists of three different methods including secondary data collection, focus group discussion, and workshop involving students, teachers, school administrators and staffs from selected public schools. Findings suggest that impacts of small-scale floods to school communities (students, teacher and staffs) particularly to the most marginalised students were considerable and their cumulative impacts may be comparable or more important than large-scale floods. Yet, they remain poorly documented and are not addressed by any disaster risk reduction policies in the country. In addition, local capacities of school communities which are more apparent in times of small-scale floods are also neglected. The study then argues that meaningful policies and actions which aim to reduce disaster risk and thus address global learning crisis in the education sector should fully consider small-scale disasters and floods.

The Debris Flow of 1<sup>st</sup> August 2012 in Kakpenyi-Tinta (Akwaya Sub Division) Southwest Cameroon—I: Event Description, Causes and Impacts

Compared to large-scale infrequent disasters like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and gas explosions from volcanic (maar) lakes, most small-scale everyday disasters (e.g., landslides and floods) are not well reported and documented in Cameroon, despite the fact that cumulatively, they cause the most casualties and distress to the people affected. This paper documents a debris flow that occurred on the 1st of August 2012 in Kakpenyi, a quarter found in Tinta, one of the villages of Akwaya Sub Division in Manyu Division of the Southwest Region of Cameroon. The event started from the western slope (06°14.350'N & 09°31.475'E) of a hogback in the settlement, and mobilized ca 3.47 × 106 m3 of material over a ca 1 km distance. The material was made up of a chaotic mix of mud, rock fragments, boulders, twigs, tree logs, trunks, and roots. Its distal part dammed river Kakpenyi forming a 10 m deep lake which eventually safely emptied itself. No casualties were recorded but 20 people got injured and 21 people lost farmland. The debris flow was not caused by earthquake shaking. Instead, inappropriate land use acted as a remote cause to predispose the steep slope, while heavy rainfall triggered the flow. Verbal reports talk of a similar event 40 years ago in the area. This shows that Kakpenyi is vulnerable to this kind of hazard, requiring that major infrastructural development projects like roads and bridges in the area be preceded by detailed hazard and vulnerability assessments.

Social capital for disaster risk reduction and management with empirical evidences from Sundarbans of India

Social capital is a resource which is embedded in every community and it has been observed that it plays an important role in different stages of a disaster. Social capital can be crucial for a community to survive till outside help arrives, in event of a disaster, and many a time it is the only resource that the community can mobilize to respond and recover. This research paper reviewed the contribution of social capital with different empirical evidences from cases across the world and brought it into the perspective of the study area in Sundarbans, India. The study area is frequented by disasters like tropical cyclones and surges, it was observed that the network at the community level is crucial for survival of the community. It also was observed that social capital acts like an informal insurance in cases of small scale disasters. Social capital is more relevant in this remote study area as it compensates for the gaps in basic infrastructure and proper disaster management institutions. Thus, proper mobilization of social capital can really be an asset to communities living in remote hazardous area.

Disaster risk at the margins: Homelessness, vulnerability and hazards

Many marginalised groups have received significant attention in disaster literature and disaster risk reduction policy, however others, such as the urban homeless, have stirred much less academic and policy interest. There has also been limited consideration among disaster specialists, who tend to concentrate on large-scale disaster risk, on the significance of everyday hazards and small-scale disasters for those living at the margins. Drawing on a scoping study that explored homelessness and hazards in Delhi, India, this paper contributes to closing these gaps as well as emerging discussions on disaster risk at the margins. The study focuses on the linkages between the multi-faceted marginalisation of homeless people and their various vulnerabilities to disaster associated with both everyday small-scale hazards and large-scale natural hazards. Highlighting the complexity and acute vulnerability of homeless people to disaster from a multitude of man-made and natural hazards at different scales, it argues for more attention and integration of homeless people's needs and everyday hazards in disaster research and policy. Some specific areas for future research are provided.

Web 2.0 for Disaster Response and Recovery

Successful disaster response is an exercise in managing human resources under very difficult conditions. Catastrophic disasters can disrupt both the physical communication networks and the social networks critical to efficient response and recovery. While a well-designed disaster plan serves as a framework, it often requires communication and collaboration between responders to adapt it to the situation at hand. Displacement of library staff adds to the chaotic nature of post-disaster communications, increasing the need for collaborative Web spaces to adapt to changing situations. Using case studies of catastrophic disaster response at libraries, this article begins with an analysis of human resource management problems common to disaster response coordinators worldwide. It then discusses Auburn University Libraries’ uses of free Web 2.0 applications in support of library disaster preparation, response, and recovery. While Auburn University's location on the coastal plain of Alabama is vulnerable to both hurricanes and tornadoes, Auburn has so far only needed to respond to small-scale disasters. The devastation suffered by libraries in the paths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita served to propel Auburn toward a more comprehensive preparedness stance. Disaster planning at Auburn has embraced Web 2.0 applications, such as Google Documents and Google Talk, to introduce redundant communication channels and to allow for efficient collaboration regardless of the location of library responders. By identifying key Web 2.0 applications and properties that are useful for response and recovery efforts, the research in this article may assist other libraries in improving their disaster preparedness.

Desire and Monstrosity in the Disaster Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

Desire and Monstrosity in the Disaster Film:Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds David Humbert (bio) The theme of the relationship between desire and violence appears regularly in modern film criticism, and studies of this issue range in theoretical orientation from the Lacanian to the feminist.1 Though René Girard's view of this relationship is also regularly mentioned in studies of film violence, it is often with less than full appreciation of the way in which it contradicts central features of structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to film, approaches that, until recently, have dominated film theory. Furthermore, cinema is mentioned only in passing by Girard himself, sometimes derogatorily, while Girardian studies of films and film makers are relatively few and far between.2 One of the yardsticks by which René Girard demonstrates the validity of his theory of violence is the degree to which it illuminates key aspects of great literature that previously remained unexplained or were passed over in silence. The fundamental concepts of the scapegoat, the double, the rival, and triangular desire can be shown to illuminate similar interpretive lacunae in a wide variety of films of many genres. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds3 is a case in point. I intend to argue the relevance of the mimetic theory of violence to this film largely as Girard does [End Page 87] himself in relation to works of literature, and hence with no pretense to originality. The theory of the scapegoat and triangular desire persuades because of the particular way it brings to view, and explains, previously unnoticed features of Hitchcock's films, notably The Birds. One must bear in mind, however, that, previous to The Birds, Hitchcock produced a remarkable body of work that is consistently (some would say obsessively) built upon the cluster of themes that Girard identifies with the scapegoat problem. For those who are familiar only with Hitchcock's later, more sensational work, like Psycho4 and The Birds, it may come as a surprise to discover that the director earlier produced films like I Confess5 or The Wrong Man,6 or Vertigo,7 in which the suspense is largely psychological, and in which themes of faith, romantic obsession, or moral conflict take center stage. The Birds is a variation on the works of the 1950s, rather than a completely new point of departure. It is an apocalyptic crystallization of the themes that had always preoccupied Hitchcock. The Birds is perhaps the only film by Hitchcock that envisions total societal breakdown, a disaster of the proportions of a medieval plague. Generally, Hitchcock's films are set in stable, if modern and troubled, societies in which there are at least more or less unquestioned social and economic orders. Flaws in these social orders, however, are evident in the small-scale disasters that happen to individuals in many of Hitchcock's scenarios. The Wrong Man focuses on the story of Manny Balestreros, who is wrongly identified as a criminal and has his life destroyed by a morally blind justice system. In Rope, the practitioners of a nihilistic thrill-kill are shown to be symptomatic of a pervasive moral and intellectual vacuum in contemporary society. Both these films and others by Hitchcock underline the need for morality and social order to withstand the irrational tendencies of human nature. Psycho, in particular, stresses the ambivalence of man in modern civilization. Norman Bates, it seems, is both the product of and yet the immoveable obstacle to the drive for civilization and order. In contrast to these films, The Birds is a film in which civilizational disaster is abrupt, all-consuming, and catastrophic. For no reason, out of the blue, birds collectively mass to attack human beings. The film is nothing more, some would argue, than one more film in the "revenge of nature" genre. But the attack of the birds is not a response called forth by a moral transgression. It is not a reciprocal act of violence, as the "revenge of nature" mode of interpretation would imply. In fact, the very randomness, irrationality, and suddenness of the attack is the key to understanding the film. The preeminent question is, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, "the stupid and...