To what extent is the human response to hazards affected by variations in the economic resources available

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To what extent is the human response to hazards affected by variations in the economic resources available

Introduction

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are affected by natural hazards. Hazards can affect anyone at any time and there is usually little that can be done about them. But these hazards affect people who live in different economically structured communities and can affect people on different scales. The majority of people who are affected by hazards are those in poorer communities and in LEDCs. A community is defined “as the people who live in a particular place or region and usually are linked by some common interests”. Within a country or area there are many communities which share a belief, live in the same area, or suffer from the effect of a disease or poverty, the different number of communities is endless. Some communities are more economically funded so that if a hazard was to occur they would either be prepared or be able to deal with the consequences. Economic resources can include a range of different things such as hazard prediction quality, emergency services, readiness for disasters, and money to rebuild after a disaster. The human response is the process that humans carry out to deal with a disaster and the awareness that a community has of the probability of a disaster occurring. Every hazard has a different scale dependent on the type and location of disaster. These disasters could include tectonic (volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis), Meteorological (Flood, hurricane, tornado, smog), and Geomorphic hazards (Landslides, rock fall, and erosion). Location of a hazard can significant affect the scale of the disaster such as a major city will have a high chance of death and injury than a rural community that is less densely populated. Often areas which are densely populated makes it difficult to respond to an emergency as connections can become easily blocked and people may be hard to find amongst debris. But response to people in rural areas can also be just as hard as it often hard to reach people who live in the middle of nowhere such as farmers in LEDCs and are often uneducated and may not have seen anyone for weeks so would be unaware of a hazard. To help answer the question I will be using Tropical Storm Jeanne as an example which shows the effect on different communities as I will track it as it moved through Haiti and move eventually to mainland USA through Florida. The storm which occurred became stronger as it passed from the Atlantic Ocean to main land America as it progressed from a moderate tropical storm into a category 4 hurricane over the state of Florida. Also I will use the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines as an example of how human resources could be used in a rural community.

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Tropical Storm/Hurricane Jeanne

The storm first formed off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic where it was graded as a tropical storm. Both of these countries have areas which are underdeveloped and have little emergency resources to protect from flooding due to their poor economy. It wasn’t the initial force of the storm which caused the damage but the flooding which followed is the cause of the huge death toll which and up to 2000 people where thought to have been killed in the country of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The flooding in ...

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