Weather Hazards in the UK

11 Key excerpts on "Weather Hazards in the UK"

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  eBook - ePub

  Hazard Mitigation and Preparedness

  An Introductory Text for Emergency Management and Planning Professionals

  • Dylan Sandler, Anna K. Schwab(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  hydrological, which result from the Earth's water systems. This chapter focuses on the following major meteorological and hydrological hazards: hurricanes, sea level rise, floods, drought, wildfire, tornadoes, severe winter weather, and extreme heat. Although wildfire is not necessarily caused by weather patterns, it is included in this chapter because certain weather conditions must be present for wildfire to occur. We discuss some of the main characteristics of these natural hazards, what to expect during the course of a hazard event, how the hazards are ranked in terms of severity, and some of the impacts they can have on our communities.

  3.1 WEATHER-RELATED NATURAL HAZARDS

  Between the years 1980 and 2019, there were 273 weather and climate disasters in the United States that reached over $1 billion each in damages.1 In 2005, a single weather-related event by the name of Hurricane Katrina exceeded all of the previous disasters in this category in terms of property damage, resulting in a total estimated cost of $170 billion, and resulted in 1,833 deaths. In 2017, an extremely active hurricane season, multiple major storms struck the U.S. Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico with a death toll near 3,000. Other parts of the country have experienced their share of weather phenomena – including massive flood events and devastating tornadoes in the Midwest, blizzards and ice storms in the north, and highly destructive wildfires in the western states.

  These and other weather-related hazards fall into two major categories:

  • Meteorological hazards

    : A weather event that occurs because of processes in the Earth's atmosphere.
  • Hydrological hazards

    : A weather event that occurs as part of the Earth's water systems.

  It is possible (and common) for an event to fit within both categories. The most prevalent meteorological and hydrological hazards that occur in the United States include:

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  Environmental Hazards in the British Isles

  • A.H. Perry(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The variability and complexity in natural and human systems can make some phenomena, for example a river, both a hazard and a resource. Hazards have been defined by Gardiner (1977) as ‘events, objects, processes and substances that are perceived to cause more damage to, or impose more costs on, society than the benefits they give’. Research has particularly focused on natural hazards defined by Burton and Kates (1964) as ‘those elements of the physical environment harmful to Man and caused by forces extraneous to him’, and for the purpose of a symposium in Australia in 1976 as ‘those extreme geophysical events greatly exceeding normal human expectation in terms of their magnitude or frequency and causing major human hardship with significant material damage to Man and his works and possible loss of life’. As such, they occur as an interaction between systems of human resource management and systems of geophysical events. By definition then, a hazard is a function both of the physical event itself and of the state of human society, including specifically the adjustment adopted to cope with the hazard and the state of preparedness. Hazard events become hazardous only when harmful interactions occur with populations, activities and wealth, and with the environments that humans value and need. The extreme geophysical events collectively referred to as natural hazards stand near one end of a spectrum of phenomena ranging from natural to humanly-induced hazards (Fig. 1.1). Natural hazards can be viewed as processes whereby energy is transferred rapidly from the environment to the works of Man, inflicting damage to both life and property. It is not the total amounts of energy released that create natural disasters but energy concentrated and delivered over short-time intervals. In the British Isles it is the rapid movement of air and water or land and the interconnection between these elements when the movement takes place that is responsible for hazardous events

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  Environmental Hazards

  Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster

  • Keith Smith(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Hazards and disasters can no longer be viewed as one-off, site-specific events capable of regulation by local responses alone. In some instances the wider links and consequences are fairly clear; for example, global warming drives sea-level rise, which leads to increased risks from coastal floods. Other questions, such as the adverse effects of natural hazards on economic development, or on the future security of food and water supplies, are less self-evident. Unlike traditional ‘natural hazards’, many of these complex interrelationships have become prominent recently and there

  Figure 1.2

  Extreme geophysical events and severe system failures within a framework of global change and sustainability issues.

  is a lack of historical experience and scientific record to enable understanding. As a result, some key issues — like the impact of climate change on environmental hazards — remain controversial within both scientific and political circles (see Chapter 14 ).

  Most environmental hazards can be placed on an approximate scale of causation, ranging from entirely natural forces to examples subject to considerable human influence (Figure 1.3 ) As the scale moves from rarer, uncontrolled

  Figure 1.3

  A generalized spectrum of environmental hazards from physical to human causes. Risks with a high level of human causation are more readily accepted and more diffuse in terms of disaster impact.

  natural events (asteroid impact, earthquake) through more ‘quasi-natural’ hazards (landslide, bushfire) towards more common technological-type hazards (transport accident, air pollution), so disaster impacts tend to become less concentrated within a particular community. As the extent of human causation grows, the risk spreads and the public tends to be more accepting of any loss. Entirely voluntary life-style hazards, such as cigarette smoking or mountaineering, are excluded from this book because they are wholly man-made, self-inflicted risks. Similarly, hazards of mass violence are excluded because crime, warfare and terrorism are intentional harmful acts on humans by humans. On the other hand, some societal characteristics do influence hazard impacts, either directly or indirectly. For example, certain epidemics of infectious disease are accepted in this book because they are not only a major cause of disaster deaths but are also related to environmental conditions. Factors such as poverty, ill-health and environmental degradation are not hazards in themselves but they have indirect effects by amplifying human vulnerability to hazardous events (see Chapter 3

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  The Changing Geography of the UK

  • Hugh Matthews, Vince Gardiner(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Hazard is an attribute that is definable as the propensity to cause harm, loss or adverse consequences. It is a human construct attributable to objects, substances, activities, processes or circumstances that result in harms, losses or costs to humans and what they value. Hazards are, therefore, defined by humans and not nature. They are cultural constructions and as human societies evolve and knowledge increases so too do the criteria for determining hazard and the range of phenomena that receive the label. As a consequence, hazard must be envisaged as a dynamic concept, in many regards similar to the concept of resource: indeed, Zimmerman’s famous statement about resources can be adapted to hazard to yield ‘hazards are not, they become’.

  Traditionally, three broad groups of hazard have been recognised, ‘social’, ‘technological’ and ‘natural’, with much of the geographical literature focusing on the so-called ‘natural hazards’ which can be defined as ‘those naturally occurring elements of the physical environment harmful to humans, human activity and the things that humans value’. Two broad categories are normally distinguished, geophysical and biological, which are capable of considerable further subdivision (e.g. atmospheric, geomorphological, floral, faunal, etc.). Attention on ‘natural hazards’ has been reinforced during the 1990s due to the United Nations proclaimed International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), which has sought to reduce the costs to global society arising from geophysical events (the so-called ‘natural tax’) by the international pooling of knowledge and expertise on how to mitigate adverse impacts.

  However, the validity of the fundamental threefold division of hazards has also come to be questioned as research has shown that many hazard events are surprisingly complex in the sense that they involve combinations of ‘social’, ‘technological’ and ‘natural’ elements. The basic ‘four phase’ model of hazard—Incubation-Trigger-Primary Hazard-Consequences— reveals that while the trigger event and primary hazard may be easily categorised into one of the three main groups (although not necessarily the same group), the incubation process and the resulting consequences (impacts, further hazards, benefits) often involve complex combinations. This is well illustrated by the nuclear fall-out from the Chernobyl nuclear accident (28 April 1986) which was the result of technological failure due to poor operating practices (social), with the adverse impacts on the sheep-rearing industry in Britain arising because the radioactive material had been transported by the wind and deposited by rain so as to produce a spatially variable pattern of contamination (Figure 17.1

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  The Natural and the Social

  Uncertainty, Risk, Change

  • STEVE HINCHLIFFE, Kathryn (Kath) Alison Woodward(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In sum, the aim of this chapter is to investigate environmental risk by highlighting the ways in which the two poles of nature and society become entangled as we look more closely at threats and hazards. In addition, the argument will be made that part of our current predicament with regard to environmental risks is that we tend to view the world as made up of bits of society and bits of nature. Once we start to collapse these distinctions we may be in a better position to live more effectively with risk.

  2 The Unnatural Geography of Natural Hazards

  The one thing that you can always rely on in Britain is the unreliability of the weather. In 1998, the British climate seemed to have been unusually unreliable. And the damage was immense (particularly for the people who lived in areas of storm damage or flooding). At the start of the year, ‘freak’ windstorms tore offroofs in Selsey Bill. At the end of the year, storm-driven waves battered the coastline to such an extent that parts of Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, crumbled into the sea. The weather-beaten British Isles seemed to be caving in, physically, and in the case of the white, chalk cliffs of south-east England, symbolically. Easter, 1998, saw large parts of England and Wales under water. Five people died as a result of the floods. Over 4,000 properties were flooded. In autumn, the floods returned. People started to look for someone or something to blame. People wanted to know the cause of all this damage and disruption to the established order. In the distant past, accidents were blamed on the gods, a God or some other supernatural entity. Today we tend to look for new scapegoats or ‘non-caused causes’ (see Box 4.1 ). In Section 2.1, we shall look at who or what gets the blame for such events. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 then discuss who or what benefits from the ways in which we explain such hazards and risks.

  FIGURE 4.1 A weather-beaten coastal town – Tynemouth, north-east England

  Box 4.1 ActsofGodtoactsofElNin˜o–acausewithout a cause, a new scapegoat?

  El Niño is a name used to describe the warm oceanic and atmospheric conditions that can occur along the western coast of Ecuador and Peru. The term initially referred to the annual shift in ocean currents that brings warm weather around the end of December (El Niño means ‘baby’ in Spanish and refers to the events surrounding the nativity in the Christian calendar). El Niño now more generally refers to an unusually intense occurrence of this annual shift which brings even warmer atmospheric and oceanic conditions. These unusual events occur every three to seven years.

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  A Practical Introduction to Homeland Security and Emergency Management

  From Home to Abroad

  • Bruce Oliver Newsome, Jack A. Jarmon(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)
• Profound political and social instability (World Economic Forum, 2014, p. 9)