Developing Landslide Hazard Scenario of Kashmir Himalaya from the Historical Events

Kashmir Himalaya being a rugged and tectonically active zone has complex, unstable geology along with steep slopes, creating a favorable environment for landslide hazards, especially along the National Highway (NH-44) that connects the Vale of Kashmir with the rest of India. The historical landslide database for the whole country has not yet been developed and the data provided by various government organizations are often very limited because most of the time local and small-scale landslide events do not get recorded, thus, leading to misinterpretations. The present study focuses on retrieving the information on landslide events and their impacts to develop a comprehensive database for the period from 1990 to 2020 in Jammu and Kashmir, emphasizing Jammu-Srinagar National Highway (NH-44). A hotspot analysis tool (Getis-ord-Gi* algorithm) was used to understand the spatial distribution and concentration of the events throughout the region. The annual and seasonal analysis of the 739 landslide events reported in the valley for the selected period suggests an increasing trend causing 1000 fatalities and 267 injuries. The findings show that out of 20 districts, 16 are relatively more exposed to landslides and the socio-impact induced by landslides was found more along the NH-44 with 303 landslide occurrences reported in 260 days in the past three decades having a high intensity of damage and loss. The results of this study are expected to be of potential use for developing a Landslide Early Warning System (LEWS) and for mitigating the impacts of landslides in the Kashmir Himalaya.

A Simplified Methodology for Rapidly Analyzing the Effect of Multi-Hazard Scenario on Atmospheric Storage Tanks

Natural hazard events that trigger technical emergencies (Natech events), as a typical type of multi-hazard, have become a matter of growing concern. In particular, the occurrence of Natech events in industrial areas triggered a number of severe accidents. The present research aims at introducing a sound but simplified methodology to quickly and flexibly assess the vulnerability of atmospheric storage tanks to multiple natural disasters in Natech events. This method consists of 8 steps, relying on the simplified physical models of tank damage caused by natural disasters. The models of wind overturning tank and tank buckling caused by hail are proposed. In addition, the assessment process of tank vulnerability is demonstrated from two aspects: deterministic analysis and probabilistic analysis. The uncertain parameter set (UPS) proposed in the method and the Monte Carlo simulation method can help to purposefully analyze the impact of various parameters and this method is also a general method, which is also applicable to Natech events including other natural disasters or other types of storage tanks.

Safety Diagnostics and Degraded Operational Modes

Unmanned ground combat vehicles (UGCV) promise numerous ultimate military, civilian, and space applications. The focus of this research mainly deals with how a non-geometric hazard scenario may potentially lead to a mission ending situation and a non geometric hazard can be considered as any terrain feature or object that is adjudged to be non-traversable by virtue of its physical properties. The novelty of this research lies in how a UGCV in a military applications can overcome the challenges of traversing through ever changing natural obstacles when compared to the reinforcing obstacles which are encountered by autonomous vehicle in a conventional structured scenario (see Figure 1).Figure 1. Traversal across an off-road terrain facing uneven terrain and obstacles.An operational design domain (ODD) can help specify potential unsafe situations and restrict the vehicle’s operation within them. A complete ODD will guarantee that the safety arguments can be dealt in a streamlined manner and in scenarios of restricting the ODD, the overall availability of the system gets reduced. With a semantic ODD structure for the UGVC, the standard development of the safety process for an automotive system is achieved and with the already created safety protocols, the overall situation space is reduced during critical situations.DISTRIBUTION A. Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. OPSEC5045The process of identifying reduced operational domain (ROD) starts with the quantificationand analysis of maneuvers and further leads to the identification of critical situations. Criticalareas are conditions of the environment that cause unintentional behaviour which eventuallyleads to an accident. A state machine constituting nominal behaviour will form the basis for acomponent fault tree (CFT) which is used to identify conditions that cause critical situations.Subsequently, the corresponding risk of an identified critical situation is assessed as a part ofthis process.The safety diagnostics mainly depends on a probabilistic model-based controller examining adynamic environment in which the stochastic evolution depends on the input of observationsand the current behaviour of the UGCV. In order to model the real-life performance of safetycritical systems realistically and accurately, Markov chain and Bayesian filters are highlyuseful. The finite state essence of the discrete controller may possibly lead to incorrectbehaviour of the complete system if an unforeseen situation occurs and for which there is alack of any predefined contingency. For this purpose, it becomes important to have a sense ofa complete set of admissible scenarios and also to develop a structured decision-making processfor each of the previously mentioned scenarios. State machine and failure propagation treescan help in determining the failure probabilities which keep updating based on changes incircumstances and this would help define if a mission should continue. As a part of thisresearch, Markov decision process which forms the basis for decision making process isemployed to identify and compare a set of state sequences and this in turn would help inrealizing better maneuverability of the vehicle.The assignment of ROD can be accomplished with the complete risk assessment of the criticalsituations. By assigning the ROD, the aim of increasing the overall availability of the systemwhich degraded from the nominal driving behaviour is fulfilled and this would allow for thesafe operation of UGCV.

Resiliency Assessment of Road Networks during Mega Sport Events: The Case of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022

Hosting Mega Sport Events (MSEs) is a formidable expedition that requires enormous investments and that has the potential to reform the nation’s future and create a lasting legacy. However, the increase in environmental concerns is pushing host cities to adopt a compact event approach. Compactness increases the concentration of the load on host cities’ infrastructures, which have to preserve an acceptable level of functionality under any possible disturbance; in other words, they should be resilient. Among these infrastructures, the road network plays the most prominent role in the fans’ experiences and the event’s success. To assess its resilience during MSE, we proposed a multilevel assessment approach that focuses on the network cohesion and critical trips performance under several disturbance scenarios, including natural hazards, intentional attacks, and accidents. The framework was applied to the Doha road network, since Doha will be a host city for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022, which exhibited a high level of resilience to intentional attacks and accidents scenarios. However, during the natural hazard scenario (flooding), the network experienced severe fragmentation, signaling weak resilience and highlighting the need to improve storm management plans. Future research could investigate the use of weighted graphs to increase the accuracy or incorporate different assessment approaches into the framework.

Detecting and Rectifying Vehicle Malicious Misbehavior for Intersection Movement Assist: A Sensor-Based Misbehavior Detection Study

Recent developments in wireless communication technologies have led to the evolution of connectivity between vehicles. Maintaining connectivity between vehicles increases a vehicle’s awareness of other nearby vehicles, which can be used in safety applications. Identification of malicious misbehaving vehicles plays an important role in road safety. This research establishes the minimum detectable error (MDE) boundary for relative position between the observer and status vehicles (SV) using vehicle sensor and GPS error profile from field tests and established minimum standards. The results demonstrated that the MDE increases in the lateral direction (side-to-side) with the increase in relative distance between the observer and status vehicles (OV and SV) while remaining the same in the longitudinal direction (front-to-back). This research effort explores the use of Sensor-Based Misbehavior Detection (SBMD) with current specifications and the defined MDE boundary for implementation in the Intersection Movement Assist (IMA) safety application to rectify false positive and false negative hazard messages propagated by a malicious misbehaving vehicle. The simulation approach used in this research quantifies the total number of false positive/negative hazard detections received by a third-party vehicle (TPV) using the IMA safety application and assesses the capability of the OV equipped with SBMD to rectify the false positive/negative hazard detection. In cases where there was no hazard, SBMD produced an 83% to 90% improvement in the reduction of false positive hazard detections. In the cases with hazard scenario, where the SV is in the not-safe-to-cross zone, SBMD produced an 80% to 99% improvement in application performance.

The COVID-19 crisis worsens with the occurrence of climate extremes and disasters

Climate change and the associated weather extreme events are a major threat to humanity as it affects agriculture and food security. Climate change disaster is on the increase as the global temperature keeps rising. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been complicated by climate change and related extreme events especially with the imposed lockdown which has affected the global economy. The COVID-19 has killed over 4 million persons with the USA, Brazil and India being the worst affected nations. Thus, the multi-hazard scenario presented by extreme events like drought, flood and cyclones this period of the pandemic worsened its spread as it affected social distancing and personal hygiene as many people are crammed in camps and water become scarce for handwashing. It is suggested for countries to strengthen their emergency department by boosting the staff component, provide adequate technical support and develop detailed plans for multi-hazard preparedness.

A Tool for the Automatic Aggregation and Validation of the Results of Physically Based Distributed Slope Stability Models

Distributed physically based slope stability models usually provide outputs representing, on a pixel basis, the probability of failure of each cell. This kind of result, although scientifically sound, from an operational point of view has several limitations. First, the procedure of validation lacks standards. As instance, it is not straightforward to decide above which percentage of failure probability a pixel (or larger spatial units) should be considered unstable. Second, the validation procedure is a time-consuming task, usually requiring a long series of GIS operations to overlap landslide inventories and model outputs to extract statistically significant performance metrics. Finally, if model outputs are conceived to be used in the operational management of landslide hazard (e.g., early warning procedures), the pixeled probabilistic output is difficult to handle and a synthesis to characterize the hazard scenario over larger spatial units is usually required to issue warnings aimed at specific operational procedures. In this work, a tool is presented that automates the validation procedure for physically based distributed probabilistic slope stability models and translates the pixeled outputs in warnings released over larger spatial units like small watersheds. The tool is named DTVT (double-threshold validation tool) because it defines a warning criterion on the basis of two threshold values—the probability of failure above which a pixel should be considered stable (failure probability threshold, FPT) and the percentage of unstable pixels needed in each watershed to consider the hazard level widespread enough to justify the issuing of an alert (instability diffusion threshold, IDT). A series of GIS operations were organized in a model builder to reaggregate the raw instability maps from pixels to watershed; draw the warning maps; compare them with an existing landslide inventory; build a contingency matrix counting true positives, true negatives, false positive, and false negatives; and draw in a map the results of the validation. The DTVT tool was tested in an alert zone of the Aosta Valley (northern Italy) to investigate the high sensitivity of the results to the values selected for the two thresholds. Moreover, among 24 different configurations tested, we performed a quantitative comparison to identify which criterion (in the case of our study, there was an 85% or higher failure probability in 5% or more of the pixels of a watershed) produces the most reliable validation results, thus appearing as the most promising candidate to be used to issue alerts during civil protection warning activities.

Planning for resilience of water networks under earthquake hazard

Water networks are vulnerable to earthquakes and failures of network components can result in a lack of availability of services, sometimes leading to relocation of the community. In New Zealand, there are statutory requirements for the water network providers to address the resilience of infrastructure assets. This is done by identifying and managing risks related to natural hazards and planning for appropriate financial provision to manage those risks. In addition to this, the impact from the Canterbury region earthquakes has accelerated the need for understanding the potential risk to critical infrastructure networks to minimise socio-economic impact. As such, there is a need for developing pragmatic approaches to deliver appropriate hazard and risk information to the stakeholders. Within the context of improving resilience for water networks, this study presents a transparent and staged approach to risk assessment by adopting three significant steps: (i) to define an earthquake hazard scenario for which the impact needs to be assessed and managed; (ii) to identify vulnerable parts of the network components; and (iii) to estimate likely outage time of services in the areas of interest. The above process is illustrated through a case study with water supply and wastewater networks of Rotorua Lakes Council by estimating ground motion intensities, damage identification and outage modelling affected by number of crews and preferred repair strategies. This case study sets an example by which other councils and/or water network managers could undertake risk assessment studies underpinned by science models and develop resilience management plans.

Asbestiform Amphiboles and Cleavage Fragments Analogues: Overview of Critical Dimensions, Aspect Ratios, Exposure and Health Effects

The term asbestos refers to a group of serpentine (chrysotile) and amphibole (amosite, crocidolite, anthophyllite, tremolite and actinolite) minerals with a fibrous habit. Their chemical-physical properties make them one of the most important inorganic materials for industrial purposes and technological applications. However, the extraction, use and marketing of these minerals have been prohibited due to proven harmful effects, mainly involving the respiratory system. In addition to the known six minerals classified as asbestos, the natural amphiboles and serpentine polymorphs antigorite and lizardite, despite having the same composition of asbestos, do not have the same morphology. These minerals develop chemical and geometric (length > 5 μm, width < 3 μm and length: diameter > 3:1), but not morphological, analogies with asbestos, which is regulated by the WHO. The debate about their potential hazardous properties is open and ongoing; therefore, their morphological characterization has a key role in establishing a reliable asbestos hazard scenario. This review focuses on evaluating the most relevant papers, evidencing the need for a reappraisal. Different in vitro, in vivo and epidemiological studies report information about cleavage fragments with critical dimensions similar to asbestos fibres, but very few works target fragments below 5 µm in length. Breathable smaller fibres could have deleterious effects on human health and cannot be disregarded from the risk assessment process. Furthermore, a few studies suggest that the carcinogenic nature of short fibres is not excluded. This review highlights that it is worth investigating the effects of this size range of elongated mineral particles and fibres.

Prioritization of hazards for risk and resilience management through elicitation of expert judgement

Risk assessment in communities or regions typically relies on the determination of hazard scenarios and an evaluation of their impact on local systems and structures. One of the challenges of risk assessment for infrastructure operators is how to identify the most critical scenarios that are likely to represent unacceptable risks to such assets in a given time frame. This study develops a novel approach for prioritizing hazards for the risk assessment of infrastructure. Central to the proposed methodology is an expert elicitation technique termed paired comparison which is based on a formal mathematical technique for quantifying the range and variance in the judgements of a group of stakeholders. The methodology is applied here to identify and rank natural and operational hazard scenarios that could cause serious disruption or have disastrous effects to the infrastructure in the transnational Øresund region over a period of five years. The application highlighted substantial divergences of views among the stakeholders on identifying a single ‘most critical’ natural or operational hazard scenario. Despite these differences, it was possible to flag up certain cases as critical among the natural hazard scenarios, and others among the operational hazards.