I will not go, I cannot go: cultural and social limitations of disaster preparedness in Asia, Africa, and Oceania

While much work has been invested in addressing the economic and technical basis of disaster preparedness, less effort has been directed towards understanding the cultural and social obstacles to and opportunities for disaster risk reduction. This paper presents local insights from five different national settings into the cultural and social contexts of disaster preparedness. In most cases, an early warning system was in place, but it failed to alert people to diverse environmental shocks. The research findings show that despite geographical and typological differences in these locations, the limitations of the systems were fairly similar. In Kenya, people received warnings, but from contradictory systems, whereas in the Philippines and on the island of Saipan, people did not understand the messages or take them seriously. In Bangladesh and Nepal, however, a deeper cultural and religious reasoning serves to explain disasters, and how to prevent them or find safety when they strike

Hummocks: how they form and how they evolve in rockslide-debris avalanches

International audienceHummocks are topographic features of large landslides and rockslide-debris avalanches common in volcanic settings. We use scaled analog models to study hummock formation and explore their importance in understanding landslide kinematics and dynamics. The models are designed to replicate large-scale volcanic collapses but are relevant also to non-volcanic settings. We characterize hummocks in terms of their evolution, spatial distribution, and internal structure from slide initiation to final arrest. Hummocks initially form by extensional faulting as a landslide begins to move. During motion, individual large blocks develop and spread, creating an initial distribution, with small hummocks at the landslide front and larger ones at the back. As the mass spreads, hummocks can get wider but may decrease in height, break up, or merge to form bigger and long anticlinal hummocks when confined. Hummock size depends on their position in the initial mass, modified by subsequent breakup or coalescence. A hummock has normal faults that flatten into low-angle detachments and merge with a basal shear zone. In areas of transverse movement within a landslide, elongate hummocks develop between strike–slip flower structures. All the model structures are consistent with field observations and suggest a general brittle-slide emplacement for most landslide avalanches. Absence of hummocks and fault-like features in the deposit may imply a more fluidal flow of emplacement or very low cohesion of lithologies. Hummocks can be used as kinematic indicators to indicate landslide evolution and reconstruct initial failures and provide a framework with which to study emplacement dynamics

Volcano-tectonic controls and emplacemnt kinematics of the Iriga debris avalanches (Philippines)

International audienc