Quantification of Loss of Access to Critical Services during Floods in Greater Jakarta: Integrating Social, Geospatial, and Network Perspectives

This work presents a framework for assessing the socio-physical disruption of critical infrastructure accessibility using the example of Greater Jakarta, a metropolitan area of the Indonesian city. The first pillar of the framework is damage quantification based on the real flood event in 2020. Within this pillar, the system network statistics before and shortly after the flood were compared. The results showed that the flood impeded access to facilities, distorted transport connectivity, and increased system vulnerability. Poverty was found to be negatively associated with surface elevation, suggesting that urbanization of flood-prone areas has occurred. The second pillar was a flood simulation. Our simulations identified the locations and clusters that are more vulnerable to the loss of access during floods, and the entire framework can be applied to other cities and urban areas globally and adapted to account for different disasters that physically affect urban infrastructure. This work demonstrated the feasibility of damage quantification and vulnerability assessment relying solely on open and publicly available data and tools. The framework, which uses satellite data on the occurrence of floods made available by space agencies in a timely manner, will allow for rapid ex post investigation of the socio-physical consequences of disasters. It will save resources, as the analysis can be performed by a single person, as opposed to expensive and time-consuming ground surveys. Ex ante vulnerability assessment based on simulations will help communities, urban planners, and emergency personnel better prepare for future shocks

Assessment of the Effect of Temporary Storage Sites for Radioactive Wastes on the Territory of the Russian Science Center Kurchatov Institute on the Population and the Environment

The presence of nuclear objects in an urban environment, next to homes, always creates stress. The presence of the Russian Science Center Kurchatov Institute in Moscow confirms this. In this article, an attempt is made to show by a computational-analytical method the origin of this hazard, and the real radiation levels, additional to the natural background radiation, from the temporary storage sites are presented. It is shown that under the present conditions the contents of the temporary storage sites do not present any danger to the people living nearby