There is no such thing as a natural disaster, only natural hazard. That’s because the impact of hurricanes, earthquakes and other hazards is determined not by the size and intensity of such events, but by the extent to witch our built environment is exposed and vulnerable to them. What does it mean when it comes…
Read more
On Feb 20th 1835, a large earthquake (estimated M8.1-8.2) shook the cities of Concepción and Talcuahano in Chile, and generated a large tsunami which battered the Chilean coastline. On that day, Charles Darwin was on shore near Valdivia, 200 miles south of Concepción. His journal presents a fascinating account of the earthquake and its aftermath. I…
Read more
Today marks the 7th year since the Southern part of Haiti was shook by a devastating 7.0M earthquake. The earthquake claimed tens of thousands of lives (estimates range from 100,000-316,000), rendered millions homeless and threw the country in tremendous chaos. New Yorkers (and many others) can tell you exactly where they were when the Twin…
Read more
110 years ago today (April 18th 1906), the San Francisco Bay Area shook violently from the magnitude 7.8 rupture of the San Andreas fault. The shaking destroyed many buildings and sparked a fire that would sweep through and burn down most of the city. The earthquake and three days of fires caused an estimated 3,000…
Read more
In a previous post I shared some of my research on the remaining earthquake risk of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. The main conclusion was that the earthquake which occurred in 2010 can not reasonably be assumed to be followed by a long period of earthquake tranquility. Geological and paleoseismic evidence suggests that the expected “Port-au-Prince earthquake,” (as opposed to the…
Read more
I’m passionate about my work and therefore enjoy sharing it with others. So I wanted to explore how I could communicate it differently, and in the most concise and effective way possible. The overall problem that my research tackles— urban disaster risk —is a complex one and so my research mirrors that complexity. So I…
Read more
I created this code in order to do a visualization of natural hazards globally, to use as a graphic for a new initiative at Stanford on “urban resilience.” You can check out the group here: http://urbanresilience.stanford.edu/ It is quite simple, and demonstrates some of the neat data visualizations possible with R. I’ve only included earthquakes…
Read more
This post is transcribed from a paper presented at the 3rd International Conference on Urban Disaster Recovery (3ICUDR). The M7.0 earthquake in Haiti in 2010 was one of the most devastating in recorded history. Due to its proximity to Port-au-Prince and the extreme vulnerability of buildings, the earthquake led to the death of 150,000-220,000 people. Yet…
Read more
This post was originally published by David Lallemant on ResilientUrbanism.org in April 2014. The original post can be found here. In late March the large re-insurer Swiss-Re published a report ranking the world’s 616 largest urban centers according to risk from natural hazards. The report conveniently summarizes the findings in a “Top-10” ranking, filling our insatiable desire for…
Read more
This post was originally published by David Lallemant on ResilientUrbanism.org in July 2013. The original post can be found here. I have been working on an assessment of Haiti’s housing recovery and reconstruction process. Specifically I have been tasked to look at how “disaster risk management” was or was not integrated into reconstruction in order to build disaster resilience.…
Read more