When an earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, government relief agencies, insurers and other responders converge to take stock of fatalities and injuries, and to assess the extent and cost of damage to public infrastructure and personal property.
When an earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, government relief agencies, insurers and other responders converge to take stock of fatalities and injuries, and to assess the extent and cost of damage to public infrastructure and personal property.
But until now, such post-disaster assessment procedures have focused on the dollar value of damages to property while failing to account for something that is equally important but harder to quantify; namely, that the poorer someone or their family is, the harder it is for them to recover and regain their former standard of living.
Now, civil engineers at Stanford, working with economists from the World Bank, have devised the first disaster assessment model that combines the well-understood property damage estimates with a way to calculate two previously nebulous variables – the community-wide economic impacts caused by disruptions to industry and jobs, and the social costs to individuals and families.
Read more at Stanford School of Engineering
Photo Credit: aitoff via Pixabay
