Category Archives: Evacuation

Day_105 : Relocations or Rebuildings (2)

 

http://disasters.weblike.jp/disasters/archives/2950

After the 1896 Meiji sanriku tsunami, many communities considered relocating to higher grounds, however, a few communities could proceed the relocations. The main reasons why they could not relocate to higher grounds are the followings (Nakasu et al., 2011):

1) It was very inconvenient for them to settle the areas which were far from the sea because they were mainly fishermen or living their daily lives by the sea.

2) Most of them were doing small size fishing related businesses, had not enough budgets to relocate.

3) There were difficulties to attain the agreements to do relocations among the community members.

4) They, community members, had conflicts with land owners to select and purchase the relocation lands.

5) There were technical limitations to create a land for living on the slope because Japan did not have enough technological level at that time.

They mainly relocated to higher grounds by their own decisions. However, some groups gave pressures on the people who had planned to move and tried to let them give up to do so because they would like to maintain the communities to recover.

A small number of the communities moved to higher grounds, however, some went back to their original places. In addition, their relatives or other village people started to live there. Some families positively accepted the immigrants from outsides to maintain their ownerships.

Finally, almost all communities had chosen to rebuild at the same places, so the risks were retained and this combined with the fact that they were re-affected by the 1933 Showa sanriku tsunami disaster.

Concerning after the 1933 Showa sanriku tsunami, this will be explained later.

Day_90 : (Re)Evacuation research literature analysis-A Text mining

Evacuation’s research literatures are divided into two categories for this analysis. One is natural disaster’s research literature conducted by all specialties. The other is social scientist’s research literature on natural disasters. The database, the Springer link, is selected to conduct all field’s evacuation research literature analysis. The E. L.Quarantelli Resource Collection (See the Website), Disaster Research Center of the University of Delaware was chosen as a target database for analyzing social science literature. The collection is one of the world’s most complete ones on the social and behavioral science aspects of disasters. These two databases’ literatures were analyzed by a text mining. To conduct the text mining, the RH Corder was used.

The following is just one result example, a content analysis of the springer link database.

  1. Search words are “evacuation AND urban AND (tsunami OR flood OR typhoon OR hurricane)”
  2. The number of extracted literature is 824 (2000-2014)
  3. The titles, key words, and abstracts of the 824 were combined into one text file
  4. The extracted words which appear over 20 times in the text are shown in Table1
  5. A co-occurrence network analysis result is indicated in Figure 1

Table 1       Extracted Words (over 20 times) and Frequencies (sorry, original Japanese version’s words are left)

wordsfreq

140715_村上先生_共起ネットワーク2

Figure 1 A co-occurrence network analysis result

In Figure1, the circle sizes around the words (Nodes sizes) mean the frequencies of the words appeared in the text. Edges mean the connections between the words. Then, you can see the above analysis (by color) result.

For instance, emergency response-preparedness-decision-support with “event” are combined with evacuation as key words. Climate-change-impact was also detected with coastal-adaptation. We can estimate that detected Taiwan-assess-community-resilience represents the Typhoon Morakot disaster. (Then, this is confirmed by returning to the original text.)

Murakami et al. (Murakami, Nakasu, Shimamura, Goto, and Ogawa, 2015) is referred.

Day_73 : Altruistic Behaviors

Many disaster cases in Japan indicate some people were victimized to help others.  For example, the following testimony was found in a case of the 1959 Typhoon Isewan disaster (did interviews in 2009):

My father tried to help the neighbor who was drowning and he(my father) was washed away by the water. I and my mother were left”

We also have a traditional legend “Tsunami Tendenko” *in Tohoku, however, it was difficult for local people to follow this during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami disaster.

*A traditional legend ”Tsunami Tendenko”
“The ancient “Tsunami Tendenko” tradition means that everybody should run away immediately, without consideration for their families, relatives, or neighbors”

How do you think?

The following is the altruistic behavior model which we can consider.

altruistic behaviors

To know the altruistic behaviors, the below book can be checked.

Altruistic Behavior: A factorial analysis of determinant variables: Altruistic Behavior: is it a function of environmental factors?

Day_57 : Normalcy Bias

We tend not to admit unusual situation. This is the crucial point for disaster risk reduction. In Japan, there are so many true stories about the bias as follows:

So many victims told me “I thought I was ok, that thing (Fooding) would never happen to me, ” even if their neighbors were already affected.                                         – Researchers Note-

The very insightful information was found from the following site:
https://geroldblog.com/2013/04/26/beware-your-dangerous-normalcy-bias/

The followings are from the above Gerold Blog:
C) When Mount St. Helens volcano began rumbling in Washington State in 1980, Park Rangers issued warnings for resident to leave and blocked access to keep people out. Some residents ignored evacuation warnings and other campers and sightseers walked or drove around the barricades to get into the park. They’d always camped there and since there had never been a disaster before; their normalcy bias prevented them from understanding the possibility of one happening. Then the volcano violently erupted and 57 people were killed.

D) Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, inadequate preparation by both governments and citizens as well as constant denials that the levees could fail are an example of normalcy bias as were the thousands of people who refused to evacuate. After the hurricane, many of the Louisiana Super dome refugees were unable to cope with the disaster. Many people couldn’t understand that a hurricane could devastate their city and, unable to help themselves, they waited in vain for government help that never came as murders and rapes escalated, sewers backed up, and food and water ran out. Normalcy bias left them unable to deal with the disaster.”