IMPACT OF DISASTERS

➢ Every year, millions of people are affected by both human-caused and natural
disasters.
➢ Disasters may be explosions, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, or fires.
➢ In a disaster, you face the danger of death or physical injury. You may also lose your
home, possessions, and community.
➢ Hazard, risk, vulnerability and capacity as factors affecting the impact of a disaster
➢ Different disasters affects people and groups of people differently as identified by their
vulnerability.
IMPACT OF DISASTERS
 IMPACT - Earthquake

Impact due to Earthquake

➢ Earthquake is a natural disaster not predictable to any degree of accuracy.

➢ The location and intensity of an earthquake cannot be known.
➢ Earthquakes can inflict severe damage to infrastructure and homes of people.
➢ Transportation networks may be damaged, communication networks may not function
and power outages may happen for long periods.
➢ People may suffer serious injuries or even die due to falling debris.
➢ Reaching people to offer help may become difficult and time consuming.
➢ People may not be able to go back to their homes even if the buildings do not collapse.
➢ The buildings will need to be examined for their stability to ensure that they are safe to
move in to.
➢ Mitigation and rescue operations in such cases become very challenging tasks.
 IMPACT - Earthquake

Impact due to Earthquake

 IMPACT – Earthquake (Example-1)

➢ 1985 Mexico earthquake, the geological foundations on which structures are built can have a
significant impact on earthquake shaking.
➢ When an earthquake happens, the seismic waves produced have a wide range of frequencies.
➢ The energy of the higher frequency waves tends to be absorbed by solid rock, while the lower
frequency waves (with periods slower than one second) pass through the solid rock without
being absorbed, but are eventually absorbed and amplified by soft sediments.
➢ It is therefore very common to see much worse earthquake damage in areas underlain by soft
sediments than in areas of solid rock.

A part of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland California that

collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
 IMPACT – Earthquake (Example-2)

➢ Turkey is one such region, and even though Turkey had a relatively strong building code in the
1990s, adherence to the code was poor, as builders did whatever they could to save costs,
including using inappropriate materials in concrete and reducing the amount of steel
reinforcing.
➢ The result was that there were over 17,000 deaths in the 1999 M7.6 Izmit earthquake
 IMPACT – Earthquake (Example-3)

➢ Fires are commonly associated with earthquakes because fuel pipelines rupture and electrical
lines are damaged when the ground shakes.
➢ Most of the damage in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake was caused by massive fires
in the downtown area of the city. Some 25,000 buildings were destroyed by those fires, which
were fuelled by broken gas pipes.
 IMPACT – Earthquake (Example-4)

➢ Earthquakes are important triggers for failures on

slopes that are already weak.
➢ An example is the Las Colinas slide in the city of
Santa Tecla, El Salvador, which was triggered by a
M7.6 offshore earthquake in January 2001
 IMPACT – Earthquake (Example-5)

➢ Ground shaking during an earthquake can be enough to weaken rock and unconsolidated
materials to the point of failure, but in many cases the shaking also contributes to a process
known as liquefaction
➢ Liquefaction can lead to the collapse of buildings and other structures that might be otherwise
undamaged. A good example is the collapse of apartment buildings during the 1964 Niigata
earthquake (M7.6) in Japan.
➢ Liquefaction can also contribute to slope failures and to fountains of sandy mud (sand
volcanoes) in areas where there is loose saturated sand beneath a layer of more cohesive clay.

Collapsed apartment buildings in the Niigata area of Japan.

The material beneath the buildings was liquefied to varying
degrees by the 1964 earthquake.
 IMPACT - Cyclone

Impact due to Cyclone

➢ Cyclone is a highly predictable disaster today, unlike a few decades back.

➢ In those days, there was no way to know where and when the cyclone would strike. The
damage to property and the death toll used to be very heavy.
➢ In the present times, meteorologists know when a cyclonic storm is being formed.
➢ With satellite mapping, they can know when it is formed, track the cyclone as it moves
and predict its landfall.
➢ There is time to prepare by warning the fishermen and other sea vessels, evacuating
people to cyclone shelters and many such steps.
➢ The region where a cyclonic storm strikes gets high-speed winds and heavy rains.
 IMPACT - Cyclone

Impact due to Cyclone

➢ The sea is very turbulent and waves of considerable height cause flooding in the low-lying
areas.
➢ The winds can cause heavy damage to communication and power lines, and can blow
away house tops of poor people.
➢ Falling debris and flying objects can cause injury to people.
➢ The loss of life caused by all of these can be considerably reduced because of the
forewarning available.
➢ A cyclonic storm also causes heavy rainfall in adjacent areas leading to flooding and
affecting the normal life of people. After landfall it generally weakens and slowly dies down
as it passes over land.
 IMPACT - Cyclone

Impact due to Cyclone

 IMPACT - Landslides

Impact due to Landslides

Landslides can accompany heavy rains or follow droughts, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
Areas most vulnerable to landslides include:
➢ steep terrain, including areas at the bottom of canyons;
➢ land previously burned by wildfires;
➢ land that has been modified due to human activity, such as deforestation or construction;
➢ channels along a stream or river;
➢ any area were surface runoff is directed or land is heavily saturated.
Between 1998-2017, landslides affected an estimated 4.8 million people and cause more than
18000 deaths. Climate change and rising temperatures are expected to trigger more
landslides, especially in mountainous areas with snow and ice. As permafrost melts, rocky
slopes can become more unstable resulting in a landslide.
 IMPACT - Landslides

Impact due to Landslides

 IMPACT – Fire hazards

Impact due to Fire hazards

➢ Fire ecology explores the interactions between fire and the surrounding environment,
including both living and nonliving things.
➢ Fire ecologists recognize that fire is a natural process that is often integral to the life
history of plants and animals in the ecosystem.
➢ Fire can be deadly, destroying homes, wildlife habitat and timber, and polluting the
air with emissions harmful to human health.
➢ Fire also releases carbon dioxide—a key greenhouse gas—into the atmosphere.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

Loss of Life

➢ In the last two decades of the last century, more than half a million people were killed due
to four natural disasters alone: floods, cyclones, earthquakes and droughts.
➢ Human loss is the most widely used indicator of the extent of a high impact disaster like
flood, earthquake, tsunami, cyclone and civil war.
➢ This, however, reveals the up of the iceberg of human suffering due to disaster: for every
one person killed, 3,000 people are exposed to the hazards of natural disasters.
➢ In case of slow impact disasters like drought, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, arsenic contamination
in drinking water, loss of life alone cannot be the indicator of the extent of the impact:
number of people affected and the geographical spread are the better indicators of impact.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

LIVESTOCK LOSS

➢ In case of a severe disaster, livestock losses can reduce the income and food security of
people primarily dependent on livestock, for up to five years till stocks and herds are
rebuilt.
➢ Disaster can threaten livestock in a given region in case of both slow and rapid onset of
disaster.
➢ Persistent drought is possibly the most serious type of disaster; a serious drought in the
Horn of Africa in 2000 caused death of more than 70% of livestock in some countries.
In states, like Gujarat and western Rajasthan, in case of drought, the need of the poor
cattle owner is not cash for work but fodder, which needs to be transported from a distance
and hence this becomes beyond their capacity to access.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

Loss of Habitation

➢ Loss of habitation is one of the major problems of the disaster-affected people after hugh
onset disasters, like flood, cyclone, earthquake and tsunami.
➢ The Orissa Super Cyclone of October 26,2000 left no mud and thatch house standing
along the coast from Astarang in Puri to Paradip port in Kendrapara district.
➢ The Gujarat earthquake of January 26,2001 fully damaged more than 100,000 houses in
Kutch district alone.
➢ The Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26,2004 destroyed completely countless number
of houses across the affected countries in Asia, including India.
➢ The Bihar flood of August 2008 destroyed more than 300,000 houses. The hurricane
Katrina in USA left behind more than 40,000 completely damaged houses.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

Loss of Habitation

Figure shows the extent of house damage in the Gujarat earthquake

 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

AGRICULTURAL LOSS

➢ In 2007, agriculture accounted globally for employment to one-third of the total

workforce of the world. In the same year, in India, agriculture contributed to almost 16.6%
of the GDP and provided employment to $2% of the total workforce in the country.
➢ However, agriculture is heavily dependent on weather, climate, availability of water,
distribution of the annual rainfall, and hence, is adversely affected by hydro
meteorological disasters, in particular.
➢ As an example, in the Bihar flood of August 2008, 840,000 acres of standing crop was
completely damaged. Before 2005, disaster relief and response in the country was the
responsibility of the Department of Agriculture, Government of India.
➢ This was possibly because the impact of disasters was assessed by the loss of agriculture,
apart from human loss.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

AGRICULTURAL LOSS

➢ It has been mentioned earlier that 52% of the total workforce of India is dependent on
agricultural activities.
➢ Any serious disruption of agricultural practices due to disaster is bound to adversely
impact the livelihood of the majority of the workforce in the country.
➢ All natural disasters, therefore, shrink the livelihood opportunity, more so of the poor in
the unorganized sector.
➢ For this reason, the think tank of the British Government agency Department for
International Development (DFID) in its development policy recognized the importance of
looking for livelihood options for the poor, who are not dependent on the vagaries of
weather.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

AGRICULTURAL LOSS

➢ Gujarat is famous for readymade garments. In this industry, which is decentralized and
home based, there is a strong dependence on the poor from both the religions (Muslims &
Hindus).
➢ As a result, immediately after the riot, there was a breakage of the conveyer process of
making these garments, depriving the poor from both the communities of livelihood
opportunities for months
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

HEALTH HAZARDS

➢ In the disasters, the risk of outbreak of communicable diseases is generally presumed to

be very high. It has been observed globally, that the risk factor of epidemic is associated
primarily with population displacement.
➢ The factors that influence the risk and consequently the deaths, are: availability of safe
drinking water, sanitation facilities, the degree of crowding and the underlying
health status of the displaced population like the nutritional status, level of immunity to
vaccine preventable diseases such as measles.
➢ The outbreak is less frequent in natural disasters than in the conflict affected population.
➢ In spite of the absence of dead bodies due to natural disasters posing a risk for epidemic,
the health officials and the media frequently exaggerate the threat.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

Malnutrition problem

➢ more than one third of the world’s malnourished children live inIndia. Among these, half of
the children under three years old are underweight.
➢ One of the major causes for malnutrition in India is economic inequality. Due to the low
economic status of some parts of the population, their diet often lacks in both quality and
quantity.
➢ Nutrition deficiencies inflict long-term damage to both individuals and society.
➢ India is one of the fastest growing countries in terms of population and economics, sitting
at a population of 1.365 billion. Though more than a quarter of the population is still living
below the National Poverty Line
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

Malnutrition problem

➢ 25% of all hungry people worldwide live in India. Since 1990 there have been some
improvements for children but the proportion of hungry in the population has increased. In
India 44% of children under the age of 5 are underweight. 72% of infants and 52% of
married women have anemia.
➢ Studies reveal that India loses up to 4 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) and up
to 8 per cent of its productivity due to child malnutrition.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

HEALTH HAZARDS A real-life example of the under-five nutrition of children

 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

CONTAMINATION OF DRINKING WATER

➢ Lack of access to safe drinking water due to contamination caused by a disaster may lead
to water-borne communicable diseases. This has been found most frequently in South
Asian countries.
➢ The examples are: flooding in Bangladesh in 2004 led to an outbreak of cholera resulting
in 17,000 cases; 16,000 cases of cholera epidemic in West Bengal in 1998 were
attributed to preceding flood.
➢ In the waves of the floods in Orissa during July-August that affected the tribal areas of
Koraput, Rayagada, Dasamantapur and Kalahandi districts, 184 deaths were reported by
UNDP due to cholera epidemic
➢ After the Orissa Super Cyclone that ravaged the coastal areas of the Orissa State, there
were no reported cases of the outbreak of any epidemic.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

CONTAMINATION OF DRINKING WATER

➢ It has been observed that the agencies: both public and private, involved in the distribution
of halogen tablets to disinfect drinking water, do not provide the necessary instructions
about the use of these tablets.
➢ The tablets are given to the disaster affected people wrapped in paper. As a result, in no
time, the chlorine coming in contact with air evaporates, thereby giving the disaster
affected people a false sense of security.
➢ A study was done by the Water and Sanitation Unit of Oxfam, Great Britain, after the
1998 flood in Bihar.
➢ It was observed by the team that the water of the tube-wells that were not completely
submerged in the flood water had bacteria-free water, but the same water consumed by the
people at home had 22 different types of bacteria.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

IMPACT ON CHILDREN

➢ Children, especially the young, because of their physical, social

and psychological characteristics, are less equipped to deal
with the consequences of disasters.
➢ It was estimated by agencies working with a focus on children
like Save the Children, that in the late 1990s, there were 66.5
million disaster-affected children globally it rises to 175 million.
➢ Children are particularly vulnerable during natural disasters and
experience increased problems regarding their physical health,
mental health, and learning after exposure.
➢ Prevention and mitigation policies can reduce children’s risk by
helping communities better prepare for and respond to disasters.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

IMPACT ON CHILDREN

➢ Millions of children are affected by natural disasters every year.

The frequency, intensity, and severity of natural disasters are
increasing, expanding their harmful effects.
➢ In the 10-year period from 2010 to 2019, 119 disasters in the
United States met or exceeded $1 billion in damages and costs,
affecting children’s homes, schools, and communities.
➢ Roughly 85% of the billion-dollar disaster events from 1980 to
2019 were weather-related events linked to climate change,
including floods, droughts, heat waves, and severe storms, with
others reflecting geophysical events such as earthquakes.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

IMPACT ON CHILDREN

➢ Children under the age of 18 years are a particularly vulnerable population when
exposed to natural disasters.
➢ Compared to adults, children suffer more severe physical effects from disasters
because they breathe more air per pound of their weight, have thinner skin, are at
greater risk in cases of fluid loss, and are more likely to lose body heat.10
➢ Disasters also can harm children indirectly. When a disaster affects parents and
other adults (such as teachers), children’s care, protection, and support systems
are eroded.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

ENVIRONMENTAL LOSS

➢ Degradation of environment is both the cause and effect of a disaster. The biggest threat
that the world is facing today, i.e., global warming, has been caused by changes in the
environment.
➢ According to the News Release of June 2000 of the United Nations Environment
Program, land degradation alone affected more than 1900 million hectares of land
globally.
➢ The loss of potential productivity due to this was estimated to be equivalent to 20 million
tons of grain every year.
➢ The problem of land degradation is most acute in Africa, where more than 65% of the
region's agricultural land was found to be affected by soil erosion. But the problem is
global.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

ENVIRONMENTAL LOSS

➢ Disasters create substantial environmental degradation and ecological imbalance,

hinder socioeconomic development and retard the process of improving the quality of life of
the people.
➢ The interaction of disasters and environment has both short-term and long-term effects.
➢ These interaction and interdependencies work in a complicated way, affecting people,
ecosystem and bio-diversity.
➢ Reduced access to clean air, safe water and sanitation and inappropriate forms of waste
management, especially in heavily populated and urban environments, can aggravate socio
economic vulnerability.
 IMPACT OF DISASTERS

ENVIRONMENTAL LOSS

➢ Poorer environmental conditions such as diminished biodiversity, soil degradation or

growing food scarcity can easily threaten food security for people dependent on the
products of land, forests, pastures and marine environment for their livelihoods.
➢ As natural resources become scarcer, the range of options available to communities
become more limited, reducing the availability of coping solutions and reducing local
resilience to hazards or capacity to recover from disasters.