Risk Management

Disasters and Societal Risk Management

Disasters can be precipitated by natural or human-caused events. Natural events, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, may precipitate a disaster based on their location and strength. Human caused events that may precipitate a disaster further break down into two categories. The first is the category of human-caused precipitating events that result from accidents in hazardous or critical infrastructure systems, such as when an oil rig explodes, or a chemical plant experiences a release. The second is the category of human-caused precipitating events that results from a terrorist event.

Disasters are events that impact people and communities. The larger a disaster, the greater the number of people or size of the community impacted. A Category 5 hurricane on the open sea is not a disaster, while a tropical storm with much lower wind speeds may be a disaster, depending on the people and communities it impacts when it makes landfall. Disasters, as a concept, are characterized by the degree to which individual and societal risks are implicated by a possible event. Thus, when we think of the risk of a disaster occurring, we should consider not only whether or not an event will occur, but also whether the occurrence of the event will lead to widespread impacts on individuals, communities, and society as a whole. Ways of managing risk in disasters, therefore, include thinking through the elements of the risk equation.

Natural Disaster Risk Management

In the natural disaster context, for example, we can do little to reduce the probability of hurricane landfall, earthquakes, or even wildfires and flooding, but we can reduce the cost associated with such an event occurring. This would entail wise land use, development, and building code decision making. For example, there has been increased development in both floodplains and the wild-land urban interface (WUI), where the risk of fire impacting people's homes and businesses increases. Wise land-use and development decisions would require deciding whether or not to allow development in areas that are prone to natural events such as wildfires and flooding.

Wise building code decisions would include requiring developers and homeowners to take certain actions to reduce the likelihood that if/when a natural event occurs, the damage to their homes will be minimized. This is called mitigation. Mitigation decisions in the development context might require residences and businesses built in floodplains to be elevated so that potential flooding will not destroy the structures, while building codes in fire prone areas might require building with inflammable materials, particularly on roofs, and keeping brush clear from structures so as to reduce the likelihood that a structure will catch fire.

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