Disaster

Inquiry: Lori Peek

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 21:00:00 +0000

Inquiry: Lori Peek Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 14:00

Lauren Price

Natural Hazards

Lori Peek (PhDSoc’05), a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ sociology professor, directs the university’s Natural Hazards Center.

Floods, hurricanes and wildfires: 2017 has been devastating in the U.S. Have you been unusually busy?

Yes. We have been compiling resources for community members, stakeholders and others to help educate and inform as these disasters are unfolding. We also run a quick-response grant program that helps deploy researchers into the field so they can gather data and launch longer-term studies. There have been a lot of inquiries from media outlets.

What sparked your interest in studying the sociology of hazards and disasters?

I arrived as a new graduate student at CU in 1999 and had the incredible fortune to be hired as the graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center. I fell in love with the possibility of taking social scientific knowledge and applying it for the betterment of humanity.

Have you ever directly experienced a natural disaster?

No, but when I was a child — I grew up in rural eastern Kansas — my grandparents’ house was hit by a tornado and their barn was destroyed and their house was badly damaged. Fortunately, they were fine. I still have such vivid memories of my three brothers and my parents and I going down into the cellar outside of our house when tornado warnings would be issued.

Your book with Alice Fothergill (PhDSoc’01), Children of Katrina, focuses on the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on children. What are they?

Something Katrina really taught us is that the most destructive and disruptive disasters can have truly life-altering consequences for children. When children experience life threat or multiple displacements, these sorts of things can disrupt education, peer networks and family networks and can have long-standing implications for their health, development and well-being.

Has the U.S. made progress since Katrina on hurricane recovery?

While we have improved in terms of our emergency response, we have continued to build and develop in areas that are subject to natural hazards. If we don’t mitigate risk, we’re going to continue to see these bigger disasters. We must keep our eye on the prize and work on reducing the risks we face, which means building smarter, more sustainably and with a climate-resilient framework so we don’t see more mega-catastrophes.

Has there been an increase in natural disasters, or are more people just living in vulnerable areas?

The number of reported natural disasters in the U.S. has tripled over the last 20 years. Some of the explanations for the increase are related to climatic changes, population growth and unsustainable development in hazardous areas. There is no one simple answer for why we are seeing bigger disasters, but we must understand these complex causes if we ever hope to reduce them.

Are there positives that have come out of increased media coverage?

What I’ve found most positive and heartening is that there has been a lot more evidence-informed reporting, really drawing on the expert knowledge that is out there. In addition, leaders have come on TV and been doing something that we recommend, which is to provide actionable information. It is not effective to just say: ‘A hurricane is coming, get out of the way.’ It is important to offer concrete steps people can take in light of their social context.

Are there certain regions in the U.S. that are more vulnerable to disasters?

There is no place that doesn’t have some hazards risk. However, some places have much higher exposure, and some hazards are much more frequent and severe. New Orleans, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston are what we call disaster hotspots, because they have large concentrations of people and infrastructure in highly hazard prone regions.

What is the most important thing people around the country need to learn from our recent natural disasters?

Disasters of this magnitude are not inevitable. There is a possibility to reduce the risk we are all facing, but that is going to take time, resources, sound science, leadership, focused attention and collective action.

Condensed and edited.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

Lori Peek, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ sociology professor, directs the university’s Natural Hazards Center.

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Earthquake

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000

Earthquake Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

At 10:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, an alarm pinged on geophysicist Dale Grant’s work computer in Golden, Colo. An earthquake had struck Japan’s northeast coast.

“I knew it was big right away,” said Grant (Geol’79), a senior seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). “We needed to figure out when, where and how big. Quickly.”

As the only 24/7 earthquake team of its kind in the U.S. — and one of the world’s best equipped — Grant and the NEIC team are among the first to gather key details in a quake’s immediate aftermath and relay it worldwide.

Grant assigned two colleagues to monitor the aftershocks, which could cause more shaking, damage and casualties. The remaining five personnel answered a surge of incoming media calls.

Meanwhile, Japan reeled from six minutes of trembling.

Analyzing seismometer data, Grant worked to determine the depth of the quake — the closer to the surface, the greater the risk of damage. Based on its coastal location, off Honshu, tsunami risk was also high. The Japanese needed to prepare for more that might come.

Within 20 minutes, all the team’s analyses were public: Everyone from the White House to scientists to the public throughout the world knew what the team knew.

With the quake’s exact location and magnitude, the NEIC released information about its estimated impact, including potential causalities and economic loss for the area after the shaking, based on its existing structural environment and population numbers.

At magnitude 9.1, the earthquake — soon known as the Tohoku earthquake — was the largest ever recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful worldwide. Within an hour, tsunami waves devastated the coast.

Ultimately it became clear that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was damaged and a nuclear meltdown was underway. Nearly 16,000 people died in the quake’s aftermath, and the NEIC located nearly 2,400 aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or greater in Japan in the following year.

“It was very intense,” said geophysicist Carrieann Bedwell, a CU Denver grad who did most of her high-level geology studies at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ and was on duty at NEIC the night of the quake.

An earthquake can happen near the surface or as deep as 400 miles inside the planet. Its magnitude determines whether people will feel it or not.

In the aftermath of catastrophic earthquakes, the NEIC, where geophysicist Julie Dutton (Geol’97) also is a member of the team, records every detail about the event, including specific location, damage, casualties, buildings destroyed, landslides and tsunamis.

“Nearly every seismologist in the world is linked to [their] system via text messages,” said ��ƷSM��ӰƬ geological sciences professor and earthquake expert Roger Bilham. “For damaging earthquakes greater than magnitude 6.5 that have occurred near cities, it is often possible to assess damage remotely many days or weeks before local communities can do so.”

Devastating earthquakes are rare, but earthquakes are not, keeping the team busy.

Worldwide there are on average about 1,000 earthquakes of notable magnitude (about 4.0) each month, according to USGS. An earthquake occurs when two of earth’s tectonic plates suddenly slip by each other on a fault, a break in the earth’s crust. Bound-up energy is then released in the form of seismic waves, which shake the ground as they move through it.

Seismometers, instruments set up worldwide to detect and document earthquakes, record all seismic activity. Scientists use their data in real-time and in subsequent analyses.

An earthquake can happen near the surface or as deep as 400 miles inside the planet. Its magnitude determines whether people will feel it or not. Bedwell once noticed a trace amount of movement in her Golden office from a magnitude 5.3 earthquake that occurred in Telluride, more than 300 miles away.

Worldwide there are on average about 1,000 earthquakes of notable magnitude (about 4.0) each month.

“I was so excited about that one,” said Bedwell, a mother of two who works the night shift full time. “My earthquake notification was going off on my computer and all of the sudden, it said ‘Colorado.’”

All U.S. earthquakes with a magnitude of 2.5 or greater are publicly announced by the team, as well as earthquakes abroad of 4.0 magnitude or greater. For bigger quakes — such as 2016’s magnitude 6.6 quake in population-dense Italy — the team has a direct call line to the White House Situation Room, the U.S. Departments of State and Interior and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“They are expecting our phone call,” said Grant, an adventurer who spent years traveling the world studying earthquakes beginning in the 1980s and has worked in the NEIC for nearly 16 years. “They want to know if we have any other information on damage or casualties.”

When the team isn’t compiling and releasing information real-time, they catalog smaller earthquake readings. Researchers and universities worldwide use their information for hazard maps, fault models and to infer what’s happening inside the earth.

“For small earthquakes, it is important to know where they occurred, since sometimes small earthquakes offer clues about future trends, especially near volcanos,” said CU’s Bilham.

If you look back on the last 40 years, this is normal." — Dale Grant

There is no way to predict an earthquake — nor, say Grant and Bilham, will there ever be, as it’s impossible to predict when stress in fault regions will rupture.

“In some rare cases, we have quakes in the middle of plates that should never have quakes but still do,” said Grant. “These are still not well understood.”

However, it’s possible to evaluate where a damaging earthquake may be overdue based on past fault line activity, said Bilham, who studies historical earthquakes and earthquakes’ effects on cities, especially in the Himalayas and India. Certain areas — such as Japan, Indonesia, China and Iran — are more prone because of their density of active faults.

“This is actually more important than prediction, because you can build better houses,” he said.

For Grant and many others, the seismically active San Andreas fault on the West Coast remains a serious concern.

“We’ve had some big quakes in San Diego and the San Francisco area, but Los Angeles has been really quiet,” he said, and a big earthquake in that area during our lifetime is a real possibility.

If it seems like earthquakes have been in the news a lot — Italy, New Zealand and Fiji have all had serious ones recently — it’s not because they’re happening more often, according to Grant. Midrange magnitude quakes may be getting attention simply because there are more seismometers gathering data, he said.

“If you look back on the last 40 years, this is normal,” said Grant.

But as long as we live on this planet, we’ll be dealing with them.

“It’s just the earth doing its thing,” he said.

Christie Sounart (Jour’12) is associate editor of the Coloradan.

Source: USGS

When a major earthquake strikes, CU alumni shift into high gear.

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