Search results for "disaster"
showing 10 items of 215 documents
Stop there’s water on the road! Identifying key beliefs guiding people’s willingness to drive through flooded waterways
2016
Floods are among the most widespread of natural disasters and exposure to floodwaters increases drowning risk. A leading cause of flood related drowning deaths is driving through flooded waterways. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, a two-phased research program was conducted. Phase 1 (N = 25; Mage = 32.38, SD = 11.46) identified common beliefs about driving through a flooded waterway. Phase 2 (N = 174; Mage = 27.43, SD = 10.76) adopted a cross-sectional design to examine the belief predictors of drivers' willingness to drive through a flooded waterway. Given differences in consequences due to the depth of water, scenarios of low (road covered in 20 cm of water) and high (road cove…
Volcanogenic fluorine in rainwater around active degassing volcanoes: Mt. Etna and Stromboli Island, Italy
2002
Many studies have assessed the strong influence of volcanic activity on the surrounding environment. This is particularly true for strong gas emitters such as Mt. Etna and Stromboli volcanoes. Among volcanic gases, fluorine compounds are potentially very harmful. Fluorine cycling through rainwater in the above volcanic areas was studied analysing more than 400 monthly bulk samples. Data indicate that only approximately 1% of fluorine emission through the plume is deposited on the two volcanic areas by meteoric precipitations. Although measured bulk rainwater fluorine fluxes are comparable to and sometimes higher than in heavily polluted areas, their influence on the surrounding vegetation i…
The impact of climate change on the distribution of rural income in Ethiopia
2018
Recent evidence suggests that global climate change is likely to increase the incidence of environmental disasters, as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. As a result, it is generally recognized that climate and weather variability has negative impacts on households’ welfare relying mainly on agriculture. In Ethiopia, 95% of the population depends on rain-fed agriculture and consequently the economic impact of climate change is crucial for small-scale farmers’ food security and welfare. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of climate change on rural households’ welfare in Ethiopia by using a Quantile Regression (QR) analysis. The main…
Postmortem Imaging in Mass Disasters
2019
The term “mass casualty” in the forensic field refers to a sudden tragic event involving a large number of people; such an event determines the need to perform a large number of autopsy exams, possibly in a short time. Mass casualties tend to involve emergencies that are unexpected and result in stressful situation when even those with no or scarce interest or experience could be called to play a role. Radiology could be helpful in the task of identifying victims, in cooperation with a multidisciplinary team, usually headed by a forensic specialist.
Distributed and proximity-constrained C-means for discrete coverage control
2018
In this paper we present a novel distributed coverage control framework for a network of mobile agents, in charge of covering a finite set of points of interest (PoI), such as people in danger, geographically dispersed equipment or environmental landmarks. The proposed algorithm is inspired by C-Means, an unsupervised learning algorithm originally proposed for non-exclusive clustering and for identification of cluster centroids from a set of observations. To cope with the agents' limited sensing range and avoid infeasible coverage solutions, traditional C-Means needs to be enhanced with proximity constraints, ensuring that each agent takes into account only neighboring PoIs. The proposed co…
Economic Adaptation to Risky Environment in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of the "Accrues" of the Doubs in Chaussin (Jura, France) from c. 1370 to c…
2017
Located along the meanders of the Doubs, the people of Chaussin had to deal with the particular impact of the river on their environment. Due to the impact of the Little Ice Age on water levels in the area, the Doubs sometimes had special floods, which frequently changed its course from the end of the fourteenth century. As a result, some lands were absorbed, and others emerged, which were called the “accrues.” From 1377 the first observation of lost lands appears in the accounts of the castellan, in a petition from landowners who did not want to pay taxes on these fields. More than twenty years later, in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the duke of Burgundy, facing the same situa…
University Hospital Fire Disaster — Lessons to Learn
1995
Reports on hospital fire disasters are only rarely published in medical journals, and then only in journals dealing with fire fighting or hospital management. Blumenhagen found only two English language articles published between 1977 and 1987, according to which 24 500 severe events were registered in the USA, equalling three events per institution per year. However, only 30–40% of these events were reported to the fire department. In the USA only 11% of all registered events caused damage amounting to more than US$ 1 000 000.
A new system for the representation of places hit by disasters
2010
This paper analyses a new system for data collection and management after a disaster. In particular, the system enables to represent what exists in a place, and to visualize the preceding state, in a synoptic vision before and after the event; and also enables the consultation of synthetic information, the possibility of connections to internet sites for further in depth analysis and then the possibility of archiving and retrieving data through researching specific items. This is carried out in a simple and quick way, utilizing a portable device. The obtained product is consultable on site, or otherwise memorized and archived. Because of all these functions, it could be a useful instrument …
Insensitivity of Tree-Ring Growth to Temperature and Precipitation Sharpens the Puzzle of Enhanced Pre-Eruption NDVI on Mt. Etna (Italy)
2017
On Mt. Etna (Italy), an enhanced Normalized Difference in Vegetation Index (NDVI) signature was detected in the summers of 2001 and 2002 along a distinct line where, in November 2002, a flank eruption subsequently occurred. These observations suggest that pre-eruptive volcanic activity may have enhanced photosynthesis along the future eruptive fissure. If a direct relation between NDVI and future volcanic eruptions could be established, it would provide a straightforward and low-cost method for early detection of upcoming eruptions. However, it is unclear if, or to what extent, the observed enhancement of NDVI can be attributed to volcanic activity prior to the subsequent eruption. We conse…
Environmental Gamma Radiation Measurements on the Island of Pantelleria
1992
The population exposure to those living on the island of Pantelleria, Italy, was estimated by measuring the natural gamma background. Gamma spectra of natural rocks and measurements of absorbed dose in air were taken. A correlation was found between the mean gamma exposure rate and the mean values of natural radionuclide concentrations in the investigated rocks.