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Report - NH9.06 Natural Hazards Impact on Urban Areas and Infrastructure
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The session on 'Natural Hazards' Impact on Urban Areas and Infrastructure' enjoyed again a successful edition at the EGU General Assembly which took place in Vienna end April 2005.
Both parts, the oral and the poster session were sheduled on Wednesday, the poster authors being invited to stay in attendance in the morning, while the oral session was closing the programm in later afternoon.
The main presentation of the session was a double length solicited paper by Atilla Ansal and co-authors, presented by its main author. The editor feels honoured by the support, expressed also through the so valuable participation, of the Secretary General of the European Association for Earthquake Engineering. The presentation itself, with the title "Seismic microzonation for urban planning and vulnerability assessment" was debating the achievements in the Earthquake Master Plan of Istanbul, from the point of view of the seismologist.
With the next presentation, given by Arzu Taylan, the focus on Istanbul was maintained. The speaker, doctoral candidate under the supervision of Prof. Murat Balamir, who was decisively involved in the elaboration of the Earthquake Master Plan of Istanbul, was spending a year with DAAD support at Universität Karlsruhe, Germany, at the institute for Insurance Science. The presentation was entitled "The expectations and realities of the obligatory earthquake insurance in the urban planning context in Turkey".
The next presentation came also from the Universität Karlsruhe, but from another research group. Christine Schweier and Michael Markus elaborated a presentation called "Classification of collapsed buildings for fast damage and loss assessment", which was presented by Christine Schweier. The research presented is part of the subproject "Novel Rescue and Restoration Technologies" of the SFB 461 "Strong Earthquakes: A Challenge for Geosciences and Civil Engineering" (http://www-sfb461.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de), a cooperative research endeavour running from 1996 to 2007, involving numerous researchers from various disciplines and university institutes, done in close cooperation with other subprojects of part C, "Earthquake Impacts and Engineering Measures".
The next presentation was concerned also with earthquake hazard. In a contribution entitled "Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Generating Automatic Seismic Risk Scenarios", Teresa Susagna presented the latest developments in the research group (authors: Irizarry, J.; Goula, X.; Susagna, T.; González, M.; Martin, C.; Delmotte, P.; Le Brun, B.).
The presentation solicited to be presented by Carlos Sousa Oliveira on "Application of different Methodologies to Assess Seismic Scenarios in the Azores" was cancelled.
The session was concluded by a contribution focusing on flood risk: "Factors influencing flood losses in private households", by Thieken, A.H.; Müller, M.; Kreibich, H.; Nicklisch, M.; Merz, B. and presented by Annegret Thieken. The overview of the whole programme within the research was performed was given in a poster by Merz and Zillgens, called "Risk management of extreme flood events – a national research program funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research" in the morning.
Further solicited talks could not be hold within the frame of the session. The contribution of Cvetan Sinadinovski, "The event of 26th of December 2004 – the biggest earthquake in the world in the last 40 years", dealing with the aftershock sequence of the earthquake, as registered by the network of Geoscience Australia, was transferred to the Union Symposium on "The Sumatra earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami", in the organisation of which the whole Natural Hazards division of the EGU was involved. On the topic also a Press Room Session took place, which the convener was kindly allowed to attend in the audience.
The poster session was opened by a review of recent approaches on the topic of the session, as seen from the five previous editions and the current one. Poster presentations dealt with a wide range of hazards, and so was one by Smethurst and co-authors on "A multidisciplinary approach to radon hazard evaluation in the Oslo region". Lively discussion was generated around a very interesting poster presentation on ancient contruction techniques dealing with hazards, namely "Inca’s Constructive Tipology in Debris Landslides" (authors: Ramírez, C .; Ramírez, V .; Cruzado, H). The poster by Szakács and Harangi on "Volcanic hazard in the Carpathian-Pannonian Region: A discussion." has unfortunately not been presented. Another lively interest registered the poster by Eren Uckan and co-authors on "Observed damage at buried pipelines during the 1999 Kocaeli (Izmit) -Turkey Earthquake". Another poster dealing with earthquake hazard was that by Sascha Gentes, on "The rescue of people buried alive". Following two posters presented the EERI-IAEE endeavour "The World Housing Encyclopedia", as a general view, by the whole WHE team, and application possibilities, co-authored by some participants. The last posters dealt with different hazards, like the one by Osman, entitled "2D electrical resistivity survey for site investigation at 15th May City, Cairo, Egypt", the one by Kauffmann on "Impact of extreme weather on public transport in European cities" and the one by Damiăo et al on "A comparison of blocking climatologies in Southern Hemisphere extracted NCEP/NCAR reanalysis and General Circulation Models". Also two poster presentations were cancelled, as the authors were unfortunately impeded in attending the General Assembly, namely the one by Mota de Sa and Caballero et al.
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