8º Congresso Nacional de Sismologia e Engenharia Sísmica

http://sismica2010.web.ua.pt/date.htm

Por Terras Haitianas

http://terramota.blogspot.com/2010/07/ontem-por-terras-haitianas.html

Arriving at Port-au-Prince

http://terramota.blogspot.com/2010/07/aterrar-em-port-au-prince.html

Waiting for the irrecoverable

We are witnessing the beginning of the many consequences of years of living in illusion, where awareness of the risk was deliberately left to the innermost depths of our minds, self-deluding ourselves that what may go wrong will only happen in a so far future that we can ignore ‘it.

Nature, indifferent to our deliberate self-deception, continues, untroubled on his way. Yet it seems determined to remind us the danger of illusion, and that risk is not illusory but real.

However, persistent in our illusion, or ignorance, we wait for the irrecoverable warning.

Colóquio: “Afinal os sismos podem ou não prever-se?"

O Museu Nacional de História Natural e o Departamento de Geologia da
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa organizam um colóquio
destinado a reflectir sobre a capacidade de previsão sismológica, e
que conta com a colaboração dos principais especialistas nesta matéria.

A sua realização decorrerá no dia *17 de Março, pelas 16h*, no
Anfiteatro Manuel Valadares.

The 10% Solution: How to Respond to the Haitian Earthquake

Brian E. Tucker

"The death and injury of thousands of innocent people as a result of the M 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12th and the economic hardship of tens of thousands of Haitians that will surely follow in the near future is absolutely tragic, in the sense that these people are not responsible for their suffering. But this suffering is not due to an "act of God" that no one could foresee. While earthquakes are not as frequent as hurricanes in the Caribbean, they are common. Also, it is well known that poor design and construction practice results in buildings that collapse during earthquakes – killing and injuring the inhabitants and causing social disruption, sometimes for generations. Japan and the State of California have improved their building codes and construction practices and as a result, the lethality of earthquakes in both places has been reduced over the last century by an order of magnitude. We know how to mitigate the devastating effects of earthquakes.

For someone like myself, who has devoted most of his professional life to reducing loss of life and suffering due to natural disasters, to see the images coming out of Haiti is like seeing the scene of an accident caused by a drunk driver whom you had tried again and again to stop from drinking and driving. The suffering of innocents is terrible to witness. But almost as terrible is the fear that government authorities will not learn and take corrective actions to keep this from happening in the future, elsewhere.

After taking care of the victims in Haiti, we should approach the people who allowed hospitals and schools to be constructed in ways that would collapse during an earthquake. Wouldn't it have been a wonderful symbol if the United Nations building in Haiti had been properly built or retrofitted to resist earthquakes, and we could all observe it standing now? That could have taught many people the life lesson that we can plan for and mitigate against natural hazards.

It is not enough to "build back better," and it is not enough to focus only on Port au Prince. After the victims have been treated, we should quickly focus attention and resources on reducing the consequences of the earthquakes that we know will hit Haiti in the future. Any foreign investments in infrastructure development should account for the risk of natural disasters. Any construction funded by foreign sources should involve local masons, who should be trained to build structures that can resist the effects of natural disasters. A school earthquake safety program, similar to California's, should be launched in Haiti. Laws should be passed that establish earthquake safety standards for hospital construction. A school-based public awareness campaign should educate the young about earthquakes and hurricanes, and what can be done to mitigate their effects.

"How will impoverished Haiti pay for these programs?"

I propose that agencies soliciting funds for the response to and recovery from the Haitian earthquake commit 10% of the amount that they collect to mitigating future earthquakes: to preparedness and prevention activities like mason training, public awareness programs, improved engineering curricula in local universities, geologic hazards mapping, and developing effective earthquake safety public policies. Why 10%? Because the rule of thumb is that each dollar invested in preventing natural disasters saves ten dollars in future damage.

If we fail to learn from this earthquake to do all that we can to prevent such losses in the future, that will be a second tragedy.

As usually defined, Risk is a simple product of (Probability x Consequences). However, when probability (P) tends to zero and consequences (V) tend to be high, Risk (R) tends to become a paradox kind of  (0 x Infinite) which is difficult, if not impossible to deal with.

Decision aid, Economic behaviour theory, Decision under uncertainty, Utility theory, ..., usually use the formula R=PxV to predict or indicate possible (maximum utility) courses of action (homo aeconomicus). However, as seen in the later formulation, in such a case, risk becomes something difficult to percieve. So, other approaches  seem necessary to address seismic risk. Should we, (homo sapiens), invest in reducing high consequences from  plausible but not probable threats ?.

Haiti quake: The worst of places for a big tremor

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and has suffered a number of recent disasters, including four hurricanes and storms in 2008 that killed hundreds.
Economy: The economy is in ruins and unemployment is chronic

The Haiti's 7.0 earthquake, which struck about 15km south-west of Port-au-Prince, was quickly followed by two strong aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died. Up to three million people have been affected by the quake, one-third of the country's population.

The simplest concrete structures in the capital of Port-au-Prince have collapsed.
Phone lines to the country failed shortly afterwards.
The headquarters for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti collapsed.
General Hospital in Port-au-Prince is down, Haitian National Palace is damaged.
The earthquake also collapsed the main prison in Haiti's capital, with reports of escaped inmates.
"Crushed thousands of structures — from schools and shacks to the National Palace and the local U.N. headquarters."(NBC, msnbc.com and news services)

"I didn't see any emergency services, the people at the neighbourhood were trying to help each other.

The streets are narrow and there is lot of traffic and everyone is trying to reach family and friends. Traffic now is really difficult. People don't know where to go or where to start."(Carel Pedre, TV and radio presenter, Port-au-Prince)

"Doctors Without Borders said its three hospitals in Haiti were unusable and it was treating the injured at temporary shelters.

The reality of what we are seeing is severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs, severe problems that cannot be dealt with the level of medical care we currently have available with no infrastructure really to support it," said Paul McPhun, an operations manager for the charity.

New Times. New Risks

Early days

If we say that the Earthquake Engineering began in Portugal, after the mega-earthquake of 1755, we can also say that the earthquake engineering based on scientific criteria back in Portugal, to the 50's and it was then constituted 1st regulation with the publication of "Rules of Construction Safety against Earthquakes (RSCCS)" promulgated by Decree No. 41,658 of 31-05-1958 (SPES 2009). Since then, Portugal experienced in this respect, two other regulations. 1 The "Regulation Requests Buildings and Bridges (RSEP)" (Decree No. 44041, 18 November 1961) and later and currently the "Safety Regulations and Measures Structures of Buildings and Bridges (RSA) "(Decree-Law No. 235/83 of 31-05-1983). As has happened in other countries, regulation was, since the beginning, primarily concerned with the safety of human life. In this sense, engineering is serving its purpose.

A New Reality

Currently, it appears that although the high economic costs of earthquakes in developed countries have produced low numbers of victims, in contrast to what has been observed in less developed countries, where earthquakes have caused heavy loss of life but with costs monetary relatively low. This is further evidenced by the ratio of 0.01 ... 0.03 million deaths / $ in developed countries, with the same indicator to vary between 2 ... 27 million deaths / $ in the developing (Pool 2009). While many shortcomings and external circumstances to determine a state of things which need to be much improved, we must thank the many engineers and researchers with many lives saved.

Disaters Economics

But other concerns have emerged, showing clearly the pressing need for investment in research into new areas or dimensions of the seismic risk. Among these are: The economic impact assessment, the assessment of vulnerability of the non-structural, the social impact assessment, modeling the effects of complex interdependent systems. In a recent article by the American Geophysical Union, with the suggestive title of "Catastrophe Finance: An Emerging Discipline" (Elsner et al. 2009) it is clearly evident the desperately need to find new mechanisms for quantification of losses, designed to give stake-holders, insurance, finance, and public decisiors information capable of supporting a new and better prediction and risk quantifying. However, just as Elsner, in the aforementioned article, but long before this,  the report ATC-58-1 (ATC 2002), already stressed the fact that although the engineer can predict the expected damage to structures, or even the times of interruption or return to service, economic losses estimation, investment decisions in mitigation or risk transfer should be left to stake-holders or technical finance. Among the latest developments in this area can be cited as authors and Marulanda Crowther (Crowther et al. 2007; Marulanda et al. 2008).

Social Impacts and Propagation Effects

In Europe, culminating in 4 years of discussions between all Member States, the European Commission adopted in 2006 the "European Program for Critical Infrastructure Protection, EPCIP" and on Dec 8, 2008 issued Directive 2008/114/EC "On the identification and designation of European critical infrastructures and the assessment of the need to improve their protection." Whithin the extensive documentation on the EPCIP, the body of the Directive (CEU 2008) and in its accompanying documents, it is explicitly evoked the need to consider the "Economic" and "Social" dimentions, and, if necessary to develop methodologies specifically designed to model the "Phenomena of Propagation (or Cascading) Effects " as it is formally recognized the fact that Infra-Structures interact with each other in a complex environment of mutual interdependence which can not be neglected into the accounting for the adverse consequences of actions that lead to its loss or downtime.

The Hollistic Approach

Beyond this, the necessity of addressing new dimensions of social impact were clearly stated during the conference "Beyond GDP, Measuring progress, true wealth, and the well-being of nations", held in Brussels in 2007, organized European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD and World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). Even so, this issue is currently in very preliminary approaches and few studies in this area can be cited. Among them, the one developed at the University of Barcelona (Carreño et al. 2007) or those developed by Omar Cardona (Cardona 2005). But there are still many gaps in the known approaches. Of these, the most serious concern is mainly with the use of some aggregation processes mathematically not-valid due to the additive aggregation of impacts on non-independent criteria (Cox 2009). Moreover, the importance of the hitherto neglected social impact is evident in the recent realities lived in Sichuan and L'Aquila, where the hardship of phenomena derived from permanent disruption of the social fabric, and the losses of other intangible values, instilled these events a dimension that can not be confined solely to economic loss, physical or will own loss of life.These other dimensions of risk are of particular importance in supporting investment decisions or allocation of resources with mitigation actions, mainly in the presence of holistic approaches such as "Multi-Hazard," or as designated in EPCIP in an environment of "An All Hazards Approach".

Critical-Infrastructures and Non-Structural Losses

With regard to the propagation effects, themselves also in a stage of preliminary approach, at least those produced by major adverse events, proposed approaches exist. Some of them must be reffered such as those develloped at MIT (Apostolakis et al. 2005, Patterson et al. 2005), University of Illionis (Kim et al. 2007) or (Dueñas-Osorio et al. 2007; Dueñas-Osorio et al. 2009). Other, similar methodologies, using formulations traditionally covered in "Network Analysis", are also recommended in works such as FEMA-445 program, launched in August 2006 under the title "Next Genaration-Performance-Based Seismic Design Guidelines. Program Plan for New and Existing Buildings" which provides for a period of 7 years (2006-2013), with funding estimated at $ 11,450,000, to study the vulnerabilities of the non-structural, where the deduced fragilities of components are then used to study the seismic risk in critical infrastructures where these components interact as a complex interdependent system. In Portugal, during the "National Program for Protection of Critical Infrastructures", an algorithm specifically designed to model sector interdependencies  was developed for the "National Council for Civil Emergency Planning, CNPCE", and formed the basis for identification of the Critical National Infrastructure . It is noteworthy that during the same program, revealed that more than 65% of the Critical Nationa Infrastructure are located in areas of high seismic risk (Pais et al. 2007).

From Response to Prevention

From this, and because we also believe that the reduction of seismic risk, contrary to what has been the practice, must have to be tackled by ex-ante policies and actions,  since the ex-post attitude do not return  lives nor the already lost values. As so, we feel the greatest urgency and relevance of new fields of studie in order to fill the present voids in the areas in which we currently know very little, although recognized as crucial as regards to the mitigation of earthquake risk: A better understanding and evaluation of its social dimension, and the modeling of phenomena of spreading effects (or cascading effects) that graetly amplify the social, functional and economic disruption of these events when they strike highly complex systems, such as the interdependent modern societies.

Bibliography

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ATC, Applied Technology Council (2002). ATC 58-1. FEMA-Sponsored Workshop on Communicating Earthquake Risk,Chicago, Illinois. pp 8.

Bilham, Roger (2009). "The seismic future of cities." Bull Earthquake Eng 7:pp. 839-887.

Cardona, Omar (2005).System of Indicators for Disaster Risk Mangement.Instituto de Estudios Ambientales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.http://idea.unalmzl.edu.co/.

Carreño, M. L.;O. Cardona & A. Barbat (2007). "Urban Seismic Risk Evaluation: A Holistic Approach." Natural Hazards 40(1):pp. 137-172.

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