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Wind Hazard, Vulnerability and Risk

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Wind Science and Engineering

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Abstract

With the onset of the twentieth century, mankind grew a renewed awareness about the risks affecting whole areas exposed to wind phenomena of devastating strength, such as tropical cyclones, tornadoes and thunderstorms. This chapter deals with this issue pointing out the trend, which gained ground in this period, aimed at collecting the data concerning the location, recurrence and intensity of wind storms, the relationships between the intensity of calamitous phenomena, the characteristics of structures and of their elements, and the damage they suffered, the consequences of such damage and the strategies to mitigate losses through the attenuation of hazard and vulnerability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The hazard of a system (a structure, a city, a land area, a nation, …) is the probability of occurrence of an event, in this case of windy nature, with a given intensity. The vulnerability of a system is the probability this system is subjected to a given damage (natural, anthropic, …) for a given event intensity. The risk is the probability the system is subjected to a given loss (of human lives, economical, functional, …) for a given damage.

  2. 2.

    To feed its thermal mechanism, a tropical cyclone must remain over warm waters providing the humidity required by the atmosphere. Some scientists estimated that the thermal energy released by a hurricane ranges between 50 and 200 trillion Watt, approximately equal to the energy released by the explosion of a 10-megaton atomic bomb every 20 min.

  3. 3.

    The term hurricane derives from an ancient tribe of Central America aboriginals, the Trainos; according to this tribe, hurricane was the God of Evil [2].

  4. 4.

    Sometimes hurricanes also produce devastations through tornadoes that represent one of their consequences. A theory developed by Charles Franklin Brooks (1891–1958) and by some Japanese seismologists states that tropical cyclones cause favourable conditions for the occurrence of earthquakes; according to it, the pressure drop caused by the storm can put the Earth crust through exceptionally strong stress conditions [1].

  5. 5.

    Curiously, the maximum measured speed of this period is associated with a wind event of extra-tropical origin. It is equal to 302 km/h, with gust peaks up to 368 km/h and dates back to 12 April 1934; it was recorded at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire [10].

  6. 6.

    The first data about the effects of the storm surge date back to the early Second Millennium and concerned Northern Europe [7]. In January 1281 and in November 1421, IJsselmeer, in the Netherlands, was swept by two waves that caused 80,000 and 100,000 deaths, respectively. In December 1287 and in January 1362, the shores of the German North Sea were lashed by two waves that killed 50,000 and 100,000 people, respectively. The greatest catastrophe in ancient times occurred on 7 October 1737 at the mouth of the Hooghly River, in the Bay of Bengal: the wave reached 12 m height and killed 300,000 people. In 1970, the situation will be much worse, when the surge of a tropical typhoon caused 500,000 deaths in Bangladesh.

  7. 7.

    In the Philippines, tropical cyclones are called “bagiuos”, a name deriving from the city of Baguio, flooded by waters in 1911 [2].

  8. 8.

    Osaka suffered terrible devastation from 753, when the storm surge killed 560 people [15].

  9. 9.

    Many claim the first flight in the eye of a storm was carried out in 1933, near Norfolk, Virginia, by an aerodynamicist working at the NACA Langley Research Center, Eastman N. Jacobs (1902–1987). Unlike Duckworth, however, there is no objective evidence of his flight.

  10. 10.

    Duckworth, penetrating into the eye of a hurricane near Galveston, proved that such practice was not too risky. Even though these reconnaissance flights proliferated, only one aircraft loss was recorded, on 1 October 1945 in a typhoon over the China Sea, with one meteorologist and six crewmembers on board [11].

  11. 11.

    In 1953, the US government set up the Weather Control Agency. In 1957, a committee of this agency claimed “weather changes could turn out to be a weapon more important than the atom bomb”. In 1958, Howard Thomas Orville (1901–1960), the Agency director, stated that “ways to alter climate using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere above a given areas” were under study. Senator and future President of the USA, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973), declared “from space, it would be possible to control the weather on the Earth, to cause droughts and floods, to change tides and to raise sea level, to turn temperate climates into freezing ones”.

  12. 12.

    Simpson is also known as the author, together with Herbert Seymour Saffir (1917–2007), of the Saffir–Simpson hurricane intensity scale.

  13. 13.

    In 1965, it was decided to seed the Betsy hurricane, but the seeding was aborted when the storm came too close to the shore; by mistake, the information did not reach the public opinion and the Congress. Betsy destroyed Southern Florida, stirring up people and politicians against seeding. Much time was required to persuade anyone, after this event, that the disasters they suffered were not the consequences of experiments. The subsequent attempt occurred on 1 August 1969 during the Debbie hurricane. After five seedings in eight hours, the maximum wind speed dropped by 30%, from 180 to 125 km/h. After 24 h, Debbie recovered, stronger than before. Additional seeding reduced wind speed by 15%. It became clear that the interventions only caused temporary consequences. The day after, while the seeding was suspended, Debbie regained strength and reached 182 km/h. A new seeding was performed, and the wind speed dropped to 154 km/h [11]. Paradoxically, the age of seeding was coming to an end. The countries interested in the problem stood on different positions and imposed insurmountable vetoes. The government of the People’s Republic of China, afraid that seeding could possibly change the trajectory of typhoons, made clear it would not accept any intervention that could cause damage to its coastal areas. Japan also was contrary, considering storms indispensable for its water supplies [16]. Mankind and engineering lost a potentially formidable risk mitigation tool [11].

  14. 14.

    In 1945, Seelye [32] analyzed the damage caused by tornadoes in New Zealand, classifying their intensity through a scale with classes from 0 to 5; the class 5 corresponded to the destruction of strong buildings; the class 3 occurred when the external parts of buildings (e.g. canopies and verandas) were wiped out; class 0 tornadoes did not cause damage since the vortex did not come into contact with ground. The peak of such scales was reached in 1971, when Tetsuya Theodore Fujita (1920–1998) and Allen Pearson (1925) developed the Fujita–Pearson scale [33, 34]; it envisaged six degrees, from F0 to F5: the F0 degree indicates “light” damage, the F5 degree corresponds to “incredible” damage.

  15. 15.

    In his memories, Letzmann mentioned the first attempts to simulate a vortex in a laboratory, carried out by the Swedish physicist Johan Carl Wilcke (1732–1796) between 1780 and 1785.

  16. 16.

    In 1961, using this procedure, the ASCE Task Committee on Wind Forces affirmed that tornadoes originated wind speeds routinely exceeding 500 km/h.

  17. 17.

    The longest continuous trace for tornadoes striking the USA in the first half of the twentieth century was 471 km long and occurred in Mattoon, Illinois, on 26 May 1917 [59].

  18. 18.

    Lightning, unlike rain and hail, is a deadly event. They often play a marginal role in the news because they usually kill one or two victims at a time. Actually, the overall number of the victims of lightning strikes is far from negligible. In the USA, they cause an average of 100 deaths and 250 injuries, a number close to those due to tornadoes. Lightning strikes also cause heavy damage to structures and woodlands; in the USA, such losses are estimated to amount to 40 million USD per year.

  19. 19.

    The Shenandoah dirigible replaced the German use of highly flammable hydrogen with helium, a rare and light gas found in Texas and Kansas. The airship was 200 m long, 25 m in diameter and was propelled by six 300 HP engines. It made her maiden flight on 4 September 1923. The inquiry following the crash concluded, two years later, that if the dirigible had been filled with hydrogen, it would have exploded, killing everyone on board.

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  1. Department of Civil, Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Polytechnic School, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

    Giovanni Solari

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Solari, G. (2019). Wind Hazard, Vulnerability and Risk. In: Wind Science and Engineering. Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18815-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18815-3_10

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