PDC Updates | Aug 10, 2010
Atlas
PDC’s Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities Atlas and other monitoring and tracking options give the general public, worldwide, access to important information about disasters and threats.

In Vanuatu, at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, August 10, local time (7:30 p.m., Monday, Hawaii Time; 5:30 a.m., UTC), according to the New Zealand Herald, a 7.5 M earthquake struck, sending frightened residents and tourists rushing for high ground.” The quake triggered a small tsunami, variously reported as 8–10 inches, or up to two feet. To most of the world, the event was not what might be called a “major disaster.” For people living in Vanuatu and their friends and family around the world, it was very important to get accurate information about what happened right away. Many turned to Pacific Disaster Center’s monitoring and information services.

The homepage map at www.pdc.org displays icons for significant active and recent hazards and has “pop-ups” that provide the essential information. By clicking on an icon, the user finds either a detailed report on the affected area or a PDC article about the event. Launching the Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities Atlas (by clicking on the globe at left) reveals more hazards, as you can see from the colored dots, triangles and icons in the image above. Fewer hazards—selected by various requirement of intensity and time—show on the front map, in part, because the small-display application would be so crowded with icons that it would be unusable if not limited in some way. The Atlas also provides more details and more control of what hazard types and other information are displayed. For example, at 8:30 a.m. Hawaii Time (HAST) on Tuesday, no earthquakes in Alaska were displayed on the homepage map; on the Atlas, however, 12 Alaska earthquakes were displayed, all having occurred on August 8, 9 and 10.

PDC Home
Using the Atlas interface on the PDC website, basic facts about many disasters can be found. Launching the Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities Atlas reveals more hazards, more details and more control of what hazard types and other information are displayed.

PDC also posts its hazard-warning and disaster-event notifications to the most popular social media sites: Twitter and Facebook. So, users can easily follow alerts and events from their mobile phones, smart phones, or laptops or desktop computers around the world, using these social networking sites.

At its website, PDC also supplies a list of world news links to Disaster News, providing narrative accounts and often pictures. This list is updated daily, on weekdays, by PDC Senior Weather Specialist Glenn James. He scans the news feeds of NOAA, CNN (U.S. and World), Reuters, CBS, and the consolidated services of BBC each morning reducing a list of thousands of stories to a manageable number of links to reliable information on significant weather-related, seismic and man-made hazards.

Among the remarkable number of hazards you can track using PDC resources as of Tuesday, August 10, are the following:

  • Hundreds of wildfires in Russia in the midst of an ongoing heat wave, with an uncounted and rising death toll.
  • Flooding, landslides and a major earthquake in China.
  • Earthquakes in the Andaman Islands; Sakura-Jima and Honshu Island, Japan; the Bonin Islands; Tonga; Chile; Indonesia; Peru; Puerto Rico; Alaska; and the western United States, as well as the earthquake and small tsunami in Vanuatu.
  • The worst floods in living memory in Pakistan, which extend into Afghanistan and India.
  • Volcanoes currently erupting in Russia, Papua New Guinea, Colombia and Hawaii.
  • Tropical Storm Dianmu in the Western Pacific, and Tropical Depression Estelle in the Eastern Pacific.
  • An advisory about high winds in the Hawaiian Islands.
  • Abnormally high temperatures in the U.S. and elsewhere.
  • The continuing tragedy of tainted milk products in China.
  • The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as a cluster of thunderstorms (Tropical Depression 05) in the Gulf of Mexico that have the possibility of becoming severe weather for the U.S. Gulf Coast, and have already prompted suspension of the work to “kill” the BP oil well there.

You may want to look at these online resources:

Some links may become inactive over time. If you find a broken or inoperative link to an external resource, you may want to search at that resource for the relevant information. If you find that a link referring to a pdc.org page fails, please inform the PDC Webmaster.