Author(s)

A. Lepikhin

Abstract

Recent natural and man-made worldwide disasters show an increased vulnerability of society. The risk analysis of disasters is an important component of life quality for all industrial societies. However, comparison between hazards, vulnerabilities and risks causes many difficulties. A critical look at the methodologies for risk assessment of disasters is presented in this paper. The main issues of safety measures and risk-analysis are considered. Special attention is paid to survivability and robustness analysis of infrastructure, population and environment at a disaster occurrence. Keywords: hazards, disasters, risk analysis, damages, critical infrastructure, critical technologies. 1 Introduction Natural and man-made disasters are permanent hazards for life on the Earth. The disasters can cause failure of engineering structures, disruption of technological processes, damage of life support systems, deaths of people and environment degradations. The traditional concept of the disaster analysis is based on an assessment of risk as the probability of a damage or loss. A comparative risk analysis is an essential part of a security policy in many countries. The purpose of risk analysis is the disaster reduction for sustainable development. The traditional risk analysis is based on integration of predictive (probable) and retrospective (statistical) estimation methods of rare-to-happen but high consequence events. The core of risk analysis includes three parts: hazard identification, risk analysis and risk evaluation. The choice of a risk analysis method depends on features of a system to be analyzed and the purposes of study. The natural hazards considered are droughts, fires, floods, earthquakes, heat waves, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, tornadoes, winter storms, volcanoes. The man-made hazards are fractures or damages of nuclear plants,

Keywords

hazards, disasters, risk analysis, damages, critical infrastructure, critical technologies