Building off of examples of other risk assessment GIS software such as ‘HAZUS (HAZards United States) used in the computational design of different disaster scenarios like earthquakes, floods and tornados’, ‘the Alquist –Priolo; has been developed in order to help the civil engineering companies and the people to find the closest earthquake fault to houses and construction sites’, as well as RADIUS(Risk Assessment tool for Diagnosis of Urban areas against Seismic disasters) and ASPELEA (Assessment of Seismic Potential in European Large Earthquake Areas). Romania uses a GIS program, NetSET (Network Spatial Editing Tool), designed to solve important problems from the local public administration and economic agencies. Specifically seismic emergencies, using data sets created for the specific area. Data sets are created from existing geographic objects, then defining attributes about each object are accounted for and sorts the objects into four groups, depending on their degree of risk in case of an earthquake emergency: degree 1 (U1), degree 2 (U2), degree 3 (U3) and unknown degree.
This allows the software to visualize a path for firemen or medical teams to take in case of a seismic emergency using GIS. It allows for better response time, less risk to first responders, and management of situations in case of disasters.
Toma, A. (2010). UNSING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM VISUALISATION FOR THE SEISMIC RISK ASSESMENT OF THE ROMANIAN INFRASTRUCTURE. Bulletin Of The Polytechnic Institute Of Iasi - Construction & Architecture Section, (3), 31-38.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=4ccb21ad-0c45-410a-8ddc-1bbc78975ffc%40sessionmgr111&vid=8&hid=104
Using GIS to determine the potential damages done by disasters, as well as potential paths for destruction is groundbreaking. The fact that hundreds of lives and thousands or millions of dollars can be saved due to disaster models created through GIS is impressive. WIth all the research being done with models of disasters, hopefully within the decade we will be able to avoid extreme damages or death tolls due to disasters. It is also good to see that these models are being performed all over the world, this may provide different perspectives on proper handling of disasters.
ReplyDeleteTechnology like GIS, remote sensing, satellite photography, etc., has transformed the very geographical meaning of disasters and the way that we understand them. Natural distaster were once thought of as local events--occurring in one place at one time; now we see them differently--as regional events that begin somewhere far away and move spatially & temporally, affecting many places over the course of days or weeks. For example the epicenter of an Earthquake can be far from a city, but still effect the city. Or a hurricane can be born in the Atlantic and move through the gulf causing havoc on a path of destruction. In a profound way, hurricanes today are different things than they were before these visualization technologies. Events like hurricane Katrina feel like the government "dropped the ball" but the federal government reacted to the event as a "local" event, in the old way of thinking about natural disasters. While news reported it with visual models, maps, images, etc that showed that this was truly a regional event. The questions now is how do we change the view on a disaster, and how do we realize that our local communities, and even states and countries, are more interconnected spatial and temporal then we ever believed.
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