Hydrologic Vulnerability and Preventing Domino Effect Consequences

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Tansel B. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hydrologic conditions and dependency of a community to the existing state of hydrologic settings create a network of vulnerabilities with multidimensional consequences. Hydrologic vulnerability is defined by the geographic conditions which also link a series of physical, social, and economic conditions as well as the engineering infrastructure. The major disasters in the recent history provided remarkable examples where hydrologic vulnerability of communities have been tested through the consequences observed in physical, social, economic and engineering infrastructure networks. Just in the last three years the World has witnessed the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, earthquake in Haiti in 2010, earthquake and tsunami off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku in Japan in 2011, floods in Thailand in 2011, floods and mudslides in Rio de Janeiro in 2011, Costa Concordia cruise ship accident near Italy in 2012, hurricane Sandy in USA in 2012, Haian typhoon in Philippines in 2013, floods in Chandrapur district in Maharashtra of India in 2013, and floods in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Afghanistan in 2013. These disasters have not only showed the hydrologic vulnerability of the communities but also have produced long lasting impacts form a multitude of perspectives.