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Insight
All you need is love (and a lot of science)
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D.
Large-scale disasters, whether natural, man-made or a combination of the two, have struck Earth since the beginning of time. The tragedy of the numerous man-made disasters all around us is that they are all preventable, at least in principle, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University engineering professor.
Of course, a hurricane can’t be prevented — at least not yet — but global warming trends could at least be slowed down by using less fossil fuel and seeking alternative energy sources. And conflict-resolution strategies can be employed between nations to avert wars.
In his new book, “Large-Scale Disasters: Prediction, Control and Mitigation,” published by Cambridge University Press, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., chair of mechanical engineering at VCU, emphasizes that the world would be a better place and experience fewer man-made disasters if people practiced a bit more humanity, common sense, selflessness and moderation and a bit less greed, meanness, selfishness and zealotry.
The broad research field of disasters is dominated by social scientists, psychologists, logisticians and tacticians. Up to now, scientists and engineers played a lesser role in disaster research, but Gad-el-Hak is determined to change the playing field.
“A disaster is a mechanical system, a dynamical system,” said Gad-el-Hak. “If you have the right equations that describe the dynamics and if you can solve them, you can predict a disaster’s evolution.”
Gad-el-Hak points to the way sun and moon eclipses are predictable using Newton’s second law, and how hurricanes are less predictable — but predicable nonetheless — by virtue of knowing the difficult-to-solve equations and the numerous measurements that can be conducted in the transparent atmosphere and, in some cases, oceans.
In his book, Gad-el-Hak discusses the science surrounding natural disasters, such as earthquakes, wildfires, pandemics and hurricanes, and man-made disasters, such as terrorism, war, global warming and pollution, providing documentation, equations or other evidence, and research that most can be predicted, controlled and mitigated.
“The laws of nature govern the evolution of any disaster,” wrote Gad-el-Hak. In some cases, such as weather-related disasters, “those first principles could be written in the form of field equations, but exact solutions of these often nonlinear differential equations are impossible to obtain, particularly for turbulent flows, and heuristic models together with intensive use of supercomputers are necessary to proceed to a reasonably accurate forecast.
“In other cases, such as earthquakes, the precise laws are not even known, and prediction becomes more or less a black art,” continued Gad-el-Hak. “Management of any type of disaster is more art than science. Nevertheless, much can be done to alleviate the resulting pain and suffering.”
The effects of many disasters can be mitigated before the event even occurs.
“Structures could be designed to withstand an earthquake of a given magnitude, wind of a given speed and so on,” wrote Gad-el-Hak. “Dams could be constructed to moderate the flood-drought cycles of rivers, and levees and dikes could be erected to protect land below sea level from the vagaries of the weather.
“Storm drains, fire hydrants, fire retardant materials, sprinkler systems, pollution control, simple hygiene, strict building codes, traffic rules and regulation in air, land and sea and many other examples are the measures a society should take to mitigate or even eliminate the adverse effects of certain natural and man-made disasters,” he wrote.
“The important thing is to judiciously employ the finite resources available to improve the science of disaster prediction and to artfully manage the resulting mess to minimize loss of life and property,” he explained.
Gad-el-Hak writes that on the other hand, man-made disasters are easier to control than predict. For example, he explains how societies invest in intelligence gathering, internal security, border patrol and the like to prevent devious behavior, the dynamics of which are not solvable by a differential equation. However, predictions can still be made, even in disasters that depend on human behavior, for example by modeling crowd dynamics in panic situations and by modeling panic situations as nonlinear dynamical systems.
A novelty of this book is its introduction of a common scale for all disasters. Depending on the number of people and the geographical area adversely affected by the calamity, a natural or man-made disaster is classified on a 1 to 5 logarithmic scale: small, medium, large, enormous or gargantuan.
Gad-el-Hak hopes the book, which is filled with research, equations and commentary, will better prepare scientists, engineers, physicians, first-responders and politicians to deal with man-made and natural disasters.