Environmental risk evaluation to minimize impacts within the area affected by the Wenchuan earthquake
Highlights
► A comprehensive post-quake environmental risk evaluation system was developed. ► The research identifies potential long-term environmental risks in many aspects. ► The research analyzes potential solutions for many typical post-disaster issues. ► Effective assessment methods can be applied in a post-disaster situation to reduce damage caused by secondary disasters.
Section snippets
Background
A primary disaster is the initial event of sufficient magnitude to cause significant damage and requires substantial emergency response. A specific primary disaster may spawn secondary disasters that increase the impact of the catastrophe. Secondary disasters derived from an earthquake may include subsequent aftershocks, tsunami, fire,biological plagues, geological hazards, and leakage of hazardous chemicals, including radioactive materials.
The 9.0 magnitude earthquake, subsequent tsunami and,
Evaluation of fundamental environmental factors
Four environmental factors were evaluated for this study: water, solid waste, soil and nuclear safety. Because an earthquake has little direct impact on air quality, the latter will be discussed in other sections, as appropriate.
Applied systems for post-quake assessment
The post-disaster environmental safety assessment involves complex and systematic research focused on multiple media and factors such as water, solid waste, soil, ecosystem integrity, environmental infrastructure and monitoring, population resettlement and production recovery. After the Wenchuan earthquake, researchers developed preliminary methods and an information management system through the integration of large amounts of numerical and categorical data, images and research results.
Conclusion
The post-quake assessment revealed that the earthquake did not significantly affect the overall quality of water, air or soil. There was no radiation risk from nuclear facilities. However, some local ecosystems were seriously damaged. And in some cities, essential monitoring capacity was lost, due to the seriously destroying of monitoring systems.
Potential long-term environmental risks were identified from 1) accumulated industrial solid waste, 2) buried animal carcasses, 3) use of pesticides
Acknowledgments
This research is subject to Environment Risk Evaluation and Suggested Mitigation Measurement Program after Wenchuan Earthquake. The program is sponsored by Tsinghua University and cooperated by the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing Normal University, and the Chinese Academy of Environment Planning, South China Institute of Environmental Science, and Research Academy of Environmental Sciences in Sichuan, Gansu and Shanxi Province. The contents of this paper are solely
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