L ´AQUILA ITALY EARTHQUEAKE 2009
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On Monday 6 April 2009 at 03.32 local time an earthquake of magnitude Mw=6.3 and
hypocentral depth 8.8 km occurred with an epicentre a few kilometres southeast of the city of
L'Aquila (population 73,000).
•
This earthquake was caused by movement on a NW-SE trending normal fault according to
moment tensor solutions.
The central part of the Italy has been characterized by extensional tectonics since the Pliocene
epoch
Poor building standards or construction materials seem to have further contributed to the large
number of victims.
•
•
Human response:
• All Italian mobile companies and some Mobile virtual network operators,sent free
minutes and credit to all their pre-paid customers in Abruzzo.
• Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi refused foreign aid for the emergency, saying
that Italians were "proud people" and had sufficient resources to deal with the crisis
• Five hours after the main earthquake, a group of UK scientists began preparing to head
out to Abruzzo
• Coordination of the relief effort was impressive and rapid. Within a short time, the
authorities had deployed 12,000 rescue and support workers from across the country
• Aid was offered by Austria, Brazil, Croatia, the European Union, France, Germany, Spain,
Greece, Slovakia, Israel, Portugal ,Iran ,Macedonia, Mexico,Russia,
Serbia,Slovenia,Switzerland,Tunisia,the Turkish Red Crescent,Ukraine,and the United
States.Aid was also offered by various organisations, companies, sport clubs and
celebrities.
Impacts:
• The epicentral region saw dozens of significant aftershocks following the main
earthquake. The strongest, which hit on 7 April at 19:47 CEST local time, measured
magnitude 5.3 ML and caused further damage
• L'Aquila suffered the greatest damage
• The earthquake caused damage to between 3,000 and 11,000 buildings
• Several buildings also collapsed. 297 people died in the earthquake
Before the event:
• Overnight six Italian scientists and a government official were found guilty of
manslaughter for underestimating the risks of a killer earthquake in the town of L’Aquila
in 2009. All seven were members of the Major Risks Committee and were sentenced to
six years in prison for failing to warn the population of the risks just days before
During and after the event:
• A further 1.5 c m of vertical movement was recorded over 124 days after the
earthquake
• Within eight 4500 new dwellings had been designed, planned or build on eight sides ,
providing accommodation for 12,000 displaced people.
Haiti earthquake 2010
On 12 Jan 2010, Haiti was hit by the most powerful earthquake to strike the country in 200
years.
The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time with a magnitude of 7.0.
The initial quake was later followed by twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0.
Structures of all kinds were damaged or collapsed, from shantytown homes to national
landmarks
•86% of people in Port au Prince were living in slum conditions - mostly tightly-packed, poorlybuilt, concrete buildings..
•80% of education in Haiti was provided in often poor-quality private schools, the state system
generally provided better education but provided far too few places.
•Half of people in Port-au-Prince had no access to latrines and only one-third has access to tap
water
Processes:
• The island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is seismically
active and has a history of destructive earthquakes
• The quake occurred in the vicinity of the northern boundary where the Caribbean
tectonic plate shifts eastwards by about 20 mm per year in relation to the North
American plate
• Focal mechanism suggested that the January 2010 quake was caused by a rupture
of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, which had been locked for 250 years,
gathering stress.
Impacts:
More than 220,000 people were killed; 300,000 injured and more than one million made
homeless.
•Over 188,383 houses were badly damaged and 105,000 were destroyed by the
earthquake.
•After the quake there were 19 million cubic metres of rubble and debris in Port au
Prince
•4,000 schools were damaged or destroyed.
Human response:
•1000s of earthquake-affected families were provided with agricultural assistance during
the past three cropping seasons, this included 4,000 tons of crop seeds, 2,378 million roots
and tubers, 179,000 banana plants, 16.5 tons of vegetable seeds, 239,000 hand tools,
24,000 tons of fertilizer and 170 tons of compost
• As of June 2011, 1.2 million people had benefited from water provision receiving more
than 4,200 cubic metres of water daily
• 6,000+ latrines and 2,800 showers are functioning in displacement sites .
• A million children receive daily meals through the National School Feeding Programme
• Nearly 500,000 people have been provided with improved temporary shelter
Before the event:
• Sixty per cent of the Haitian public had no access to even basic health care
services.
Nearly half of the children in Haiti were unvaccinated, and close to 90 per cent
suffered from water-borne diseases and intestinal parasites.
• The average Haitian lives on less than $2 per day, and 80 per cent of the country
lives in severely impoverished conditions.
• All of these statistics were taken from reports completed prior to January 2010
before the earthquake. They give insight into why the earthquake was so
devastating in the first place, and why the ongoing crisis continues to deepen.
During and after the event:
• Three years on from this
devastating earthquake, over
one million Haitians are still
in need of humanitarian aid
according to the United
Nations.
• This includes the 358,000
people still in camps, 500,000
people who are food insecure
and around 73,500 children
under 5 years of age facing
malnutrition.
Drogth in the horn Africa
The Horn of Africa denotes the region containing the countries of Eritrea, Djibouti,
Ethiopia and Somalia. It covers approximately 2,000,000 km² (770,000 sq mi) and is
inhabited by roughly 100 million people (Ethiopia: 85 million, Somalia: 9.3 million,
Eritrea: 5.2 million, and Djibouti: 0.86 million).
Ethiopia
• Two successive seasons of poor rains left eastern Ethiopia in drought
• Poor rains have left millions of people struggling to get food as hundreds of thousands
of livestock have died and crops have failed.
Impacts
Close to 14 million Ethiopians — 20% of the country's total population — now have
difficulty finding enough to eat, including, according to UNICEF, 62,000 children under five
in the worst-affected areas who received treatment for severe acute malnutrition during
the first half of 2009.
Human response
• Humanitarian agencies have requested US$2.48 billion to address the crisis, but as of 1
August have secured less than half that amount. The European Union announced it would
provide €5.67 million to help millions of people affected by the drought.
Before the event
During and after the event
• By 15 September, 2011, more than 920,000 refugees from Somalia had reportedly fled to
neighboring countries.
Kenya
Kenya's worst drought in
60 years has left millions
of people desperate for
food and water as food
prices skyrocket,
hundreds of thousands
of head of livestock have
died, and lack of basic
sanitation needs have
led to the world's worst
food crisis.
Impacts
• The ground is hard as a rock, the rivers are drying up, livestock and wildlife are
feeble, emaciated, and are dying in numbers as worthless bags of bones and
people everyday.
Human response:
• The Government of Kenya’s response to the drought crisis was focused on
humanitarian relief, but was slow to be implemented and poorly coordinated on
the ground.
• East African countries prone to drought have traditionally have relied on food aid
provided by international humanitarian agencies and Western governments, but
little has been done to tap local sources of relief.
Kenya before the drought:
During and after the event:
Food prices have risen substantially in the
region, pushing many moderately poor
households over the edge.
Australia's Murray Darling Basin
• The south-eastern part of Australia is currently (late 2008) in a drought that has
lasted more than seven years.
Impacts
• About 40% of Australia's agricultural produce has come out of the Murray-Darling
Basin in the past.
• A report made by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO indicates that annual
rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin is likely to decline by from 2-5% by 2030.
Significantly, most of this decline will be in winter and spring.
Human response
• The Basin Plan includes enforceable limits on the quantities of surface water and
groundwater that can be taken from the Murray-Darling Basin water resources
• An SDL adjustment mechanism has been included in the Plan which potentially allows
for some of environmental outcomes to be delivered through improved use and
management of environmental water
Before, during and after the event
The graph on the right shows that mean temperatures have been rising for a number of
years; it appears that the rate of rise is also increasing. As temperatures rise the water needs
of plants increase and evaporation rates increase, so less water flows down streams into
storages and less water is available for irrigators while the plants they grow need more water
due to the higher temperatures.
Tropical cyclone Nargis
• Northern Indian Ocean (surges in Myanmar, came ashore across Irrawaddy
river and went northeast coming close to Bangladesh.)
• 27 April- 02 May 2008
• Maximum wind speed: 135 mph
• 3-4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
• Floodwaters penetrated between 40-50 km inland.
• Formed by a low pressure system in the Bay of Bengal then turned into
Tropical Depression.
• 2.4 million people severely affected, over 90,000 deaths, over 55,000
missing.
• Over $10 billion (USD 2008) in damage.
• They refused to accept international aid at first but then UN was asked for
help. May 19th aid was accepted finally.
• Prevention: early warning system, stronger facilities and infrastructure,
storm resistant roads and shelters.
Hurricane Katrina
• USA; Central Gulf coasts (New Orleans, LA, Gulfport, AL, Mobile and
MS). It developed as a tropical depression in the Bahamas.
• 28th August, 2005: 170 mph (category 5)
• Central pressure of 920 mb (milibars).
• Over 5 inches of rainfall in southern Florida = flood
• 125 mph (category 3 hurricane on Saffir-Simpson scale)
• Almost 80% of New Orleans flooded. Some areas under 20 feet of
water.
• Mississippi and Alabama also flooded by storm surge.
• Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico was reduced by 1.4 million
barrels per day.
• Over 1.7 million people lost power as a result of the storm.
• Cost: exceeded $100 billion with over $34 billion in insured losses.
• Aid by: China, Cuba, EU, France, Germany, Mexico, etc.
Chernoby Nuclear Explosion
• Chernobyl, Ukraine. (affected Belarus, Scandinavia, Russia and Ukraine).
• April 26, 1986 (lasted about 10 days active)
• Around 30 deaths, but many people developed cancer caused by the
extreme radiation.
• A reactor was handled the wrong way and it became very unstable until
it broke down and caused a huge steam explosion, and then a second
one a bit later.
• The number of gases released reacted with each other and caused a
series of fires which caused the radioactivity to spread faster.
• This resulted of people having physical deformities.
• Radiation range over 20,000 millisieverts.
• About 200,000 people involved in the cleaning of the disaster (these
people received small amounts of radiation).
• The was not enough pre 1986 data to determine the exact effects but
the radiation carries a cycle which in the end reaches the human
(through food, rain, air)
• People weren’t prepared because this disaster was not expected.
• About US $400 million used to improve Chernobyl reactors safety.
References
• http://www.oxfam.org/en/haitiquake
• http://digitaljournal.com/article/311033#ixzz2J89grbg
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L'Aquila_earthquake
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_of_Africa
• http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1915544,00.html
• http://thesheaf.com/2011/02/04/haiti-a-disaster-area-long-before-theearthquake/
• http://emergency-planning.blogspot.mx/2009/04/earthquake-at-laquilacentral-italy.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14007181
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/28/africa-drought-kenya-somaliafamine
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake#Background
• http://www.dec.org.uk/haiti-earthquake-facts-and-figures
• ttp://photography.a24media.com/index.php/photogallery/85-draught-in-kenya-affectswildlife
• water.nsw.gov.au/Water-management/Law-and-policy/National-reforms/MurrayDarling-Basin-Plan/murray-darling-basin-plan
• http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=19764
• http://www.africaportal.org/articles/2012/07/11/improving-policy-responses-andfinding-sustainable-solutions-drought-kenya
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html
http://history1900s.about.com/od/horribledisasters/p/Chernobyl.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/History/the_chernobyl_nuclear_disaster.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/special-reports/katrina.html
http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org/katrina.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9282598/ns/us_newskatrina_the_long_road_back/t/foreign-aid-us-katrina-relief/#.UPRNAGHdW9s
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/ni200801.asp
http://weather.about.com/od/hurricanes/qt/nargisfacts.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700587/