The approach, which considers costs and benefits while looking for the best solution, is based on a mathematical technique called optimization. The research is published in the October issue of the Geological Society of America journal GSA Today. The article is titled “Rebuilding Tohoku: a joint geophysical and economic framework for hazard mitigation.”
“We’re playing a high-stakes game against nature and often losing,” said Seth Stein, the William Deering Professor of Geological Sciences in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. “Just in the past few years, both the Japanese tsunami and Hurricane Katrina did more than $100 billion in damage, despite expensive protection measures that were in place. Hurricane Sandy is likely to cost at least $20 billion,” he said. “The question is how to do better. For example, should New York spend billions of dollars on a barrier to prevent flooding like the city saw this week?”
Both the U.S. and Japanese governments decided to rebuild the defenses that failed essentially to the level they were before, only better. These decisions have been questioned, Seth Stein said. Critics argue that coastal defenses in Louisiana and surroundings should be built not just to withstand a hurricane like Katrina, but much more powerful ones that are known to occur there.
...The problem, explained Jerome Stein, is that the decisions on how to protect against these hazards are made politically without careful consideration of alternatives. “There are complicated choices that have to be made, given that we don’t know when a similar event will happen,” he said. “We need ways to consider a range of options, each of which has different costs and benefits, and help communities involved make the most informed choices.”
Waves hitting a seawall during the 1915 Galveston hurricane
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