Literatura académica sobre el tema "Effect of Hurricane Mitch, 1998 on"

Abstract. In February 2006, a disastrous rockslide-debris avalanche occurred in tropical mountain terrain, on Leyte Island, Central Philippines. Over 1100 people perished when the village of Guinsaugon was overwhelmed directly in the path of the landslide. The landslide was initiated by the failure of a 450 m high rock slope within the damage zone of the Philippine Fault where the rock mass consisted of sheared and brecciated volcanic, sedimentary and volcaniclastic rocks. Tectonic weakening of the failed rock mass had resulted from active strike-slip movements along the Philippine Fault which have been estimated by other workers at 2.5 cm/year. The landslide involved a total volume of 15 Mm3, including significant entrainment from its path, and ran out a horizontal distance of 3800 m over a vertical distance of 810 m, equivalent to a fahrböschung of 12°. Run-out distance was enhanced by friction reduction due to undrained loading when the debris encountered flooded paddy fields in the valley bottom at a path distance of 2600 m. A simulation of the event using the dynamic analysis model DAN indicated a mean velocity of 35 m/s and demonstrated the contribution of the paddy field effect to total run-out distance. There was no direct trigger for the landslide but the landslide did follow a period of very heavy rainfall with a lag time of four days. The rockslide-debris avalanche is one of several disastrous landslides to have occurred in the Philippines in the last twenty years. In terms of loss of life, the Guinsaugon event is the most devastating single-event landslide to have occurred worldwide since the Casita Volcano rock avalanche-debris flow which was triggered by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua in 1998.

Abstract Part I of this paper presented a detailed analysis of the boundary layer of Hurricane Georges (1998), based mainly on the newly available high-resolution GPS dropsonde data. Here, similar techniques and data are used to study Hurricane Mitch (1998). In contrast to Hurricane Georges, the flow in the middle to upper boundary layer near the eyewall is found to be strongly supergradient, with the imbalance being statistically significant. The reason for the difference is shown to be the different radial structure of the storms, in that outside of the radius of maximum winds, the wind decreases much more quickly in Mitch than in Georges. Hurricane Mitch was close to inertially neutral at large radius, with a strong angular momentum gradient near the radius of maximum winds. Kepert and Wang predict strongly supergradient flow in the upper boundary layer near the radius of maximum winds in this situation; the observational analysis is thus in good agreement with their theory. The wind reduction factor (i.e., ratio of a near-surface wind speed to that at some level further aloft) is found to increase inward toward the radius of maximum winds, in accordance with theoretical predictions and the analysis by Franklin et al. Marked asymmetries in the boundary layer wind field and in the eyewall convection are shown to be consistent with asymmetric surface friction due to the storm’s proximity to land, rather than to motion. The boundary layer flow was simulated using Kepert and Wang’s model, forced by the observed storm motion, radial profile of gradient wind, and coastline position; and good agreement with the observations was obtained.

The devastation in Central America following the 1998 hurricane (Hurricane Mitch) resulted more from economic and political policies than from “natural” disaster. Over the last 30 or 40 years, huge numbers of poor people in these countries have been forced off good, stable agricultural land onto degraded hillsides and into shanty towns constructed on floodplains—areas known to pose serious hazards of flooding and mudslides. This, together with the failure of impoverished countries to anticipate disaster through mass evacuations or to respond effectively to the hurricane's widespread damage—ensured the loss of thousands of lives.

In response to Hurricane Mitch, which struck Central America in October–November 1998, the American Red Cross (ARC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated on a 3-year evaluation of the public health impact of ARC's water, sanitation and hygiene education activities in eight study areas in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The evaluation compared: 1) access to and use of water and sanitation facilities, 2) the use of hygienic behaviours, and 3) diarrhoeal prevalence in children younger than 3 years of age before (February 2000) and after (February 2002) the interventions had been implemented. The evaluation included household and key informant interviews designed to measure these three components. Water quality of community water sources and household water was evaluated by measuring levels of indicator bacteria. During the final survey, an infrastructure evaluation provided a review of the design, construction, and current operation and maintenance of the water systems and latrines. The integrated water and sanitation infrastructure interventions and hygiene education programmes implemented following Hurricane Mitch effectively decreased diarrhoea prevalence in the target communities.

Disasters are always caused by a combination of factors, and the natural phenomenon that brings them on is usually just a catalyst. The underlying cause of most disasters is poverty as mostly the poor segments of the population usually live in high risk areas where their shelter all too often cannot withstand even light winds, small inundations or medium earthquakes. When Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in October 1998, all countries were ill prepared. A few weeks earlier, the authorities of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, had attempted to simulate an evacuation, but it had met with a great degree of resistance from the public. When Mitch hit, unprecedented masses of water raced down the mountainous river beds. People were taken by surprise, as no efficient organisation existed. Everybody ran for their lives. Houses slid down hillsides, rivers swept bridges, houses and people with them. Six years later, Tegucigalpa looks very similar to the days before Mitch. The steep hillsides are covered with a potpourri of dwellings, from miserable huts to solid upmarket houses. Regulations were passed in the year 2002 to prohibit construction in high risk areas; however, enforcement is difficult, especially when existing buildings are renovated and even enlarged. Theoretically it is possible to evacuate high risk areas. Nonetheless, such drastic measures are virtually impossible to implement, as no mayor or police chief would survive such an action in office. The paper presents a case study which shows that the underlying problems of poverty and the non-availability of suitable land for people to relocate from high risk areas can usually not be overcome by post-disaster reconstruction programmes. A mitigation strategy is thus to empower inhabitants of high risk areas to improve their own situation by affordable access to information, advice and suitable low cost construction materials through “Building Advisory Services” and Ecomaterials producers within the neighbourhoods.

The global climate during 1998 was affected by opposite extremes of the ENSO cycle, with one of the strongest Pacific warm episodes (El Niño) in the historical record continuing during January–early May and Pacific cold episode (La Niña) conditions occurring from JulyñDecember. In both periods, regional temperature, rainfall, and atmospheric circulation patterns across the Pacific Ocean and the Americas were generally consistent with those observed during past warm and cold episodes. Some of the most dramatic impacts from both episodes were observed in the Tropics, where anomalous convection was evident across the entire tropical Pacific and in most major monsoon regions of the world. Over the Americas, many of the El Niño– (La Niña–) related rainfall anomalies in the subtropical and extratropical latitudes were linked to an extension (retraction) of the jet streams and their attendant circulation features typically located over the subtropical latitudes of both the North Pacific and South Pacific. The regions most affected by excessive El Niño–related rainfall included 1) the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, including western Ecuador and northwestern Peru, which experienced significant flooding and mudslides; 2) southeastern South America, where substantial flooding was also observed; and 3) California and much of the central and southern United States during January–March, and the central United States during April–June. El Niño–related rainfall deficits during 1998 included 1) Indonesia and portions of northern Australia; 2) the Amazon Basin, in association with a substantially weaker-than-normal South American monsoon circulation; 3) Mexico, which experienced extreme drought throughout the El Niño episode; and 4) the Gulf Coast states of the United States, which experienced extreme drought during April–June 1998. The El Niño also contributed to extreme warmth across North America during January–May. The primary La Niña–related precipitation anomalies included 1) increased rainfall across Indonesia, and a nearly complete disappearance of rainfall across the east-central equatorial Pacific; 2) above-normal rains across northwestern, eastern, and northern Australia; 3) increased monsoon rains across central America and Mexico during October–December; and 4) dryness across equatorial eastern Africa. The active 1998 North Atlantic hurricane season featured 14 named storms (9 of which became hurricanes) and the strongest October hurricane (Mitch) in the historical record. In Honduras and Nicaragua extreme flooding and mudslides associated with Hurricane Mitch claimed more than 11 000 lives. During the peak of activity in August–September, the vertical wind shear across the western Atlantic, along with both the structure and location of the African easterly jet, were typical of other active seasons. Other regional aspects of the short-term climate included 1) record rainfall and massive flooding in the Yangtze River Basin of central China during June–July; 2) a drier and shorter-than-normal 1997/98 rainy season in southern Africa; 3) above-normal rains across the northern section of the African Sahel during June–September 1998; and 4) a continuation of record warmth across Canada during June–November. Global annual mean surface temperatures during 1998 for land and marine areas were 0.56°C above the 1961–90 base period means. This record warmth surpasses the previous highest anomaly of +0.43°C set in 1997. Record warmth was also observed in the global Tropics and Northern Hemisphere extratropics during the year, and is partly linked to the strong El Nino conditions during January–early May.

Abstract The global positioning system dropwindsondes deployed in Hurricane Bonnie on 26 August 1998 with supporting deployments in Hurricanes Mitch (1998) and Humberto (2001) are used to identify three unusual thermodynamic structures in the lower-cloud and subcloud layers. Two of these structures impact the energy content of the inflow and therefore the intensity of the hurricane. First, positive lapse rates of equivalent potential temperature are found near the top of the inflow. These layers insulate the inflow from the negative impacts of entrainment mixing and promote rapid energy increases, especially near the eyewall. The second structure is a rapid decrease of equivalent potential temperature adjacent to the sea surface. This is essentially a prominent surface layer that owes its existence to both higher moisture content and a superadiabatic lapse rate. The steep lapse rate most often occurs under and near the eyewall where wind speeds at the surface exceed hurricane force. The author speculates that water loading from spray increases the residence time of air parcels in the surface layer, contributing to the creation of this structure. The third feature is a moist absolutely unstable layer previously identified by Bryan and Fritsch for the midlatitudes. These layers are found adjacent to the eyewall, in rainbands, and in the hub cloud within the eye and are evidence of mesoscale or vortex-scale convergence and the very modest instabilities often found in the core of a hurricane.

In the first years after Cuba's 1959 revolution, the island's new government provided international medical assistance to countries affected by natural disasters or armed conflicts. Step by step, a more structural complementary program for international collaboration was put in place. The relief operations after Hurricane Mitch, which struck Central America in 1998, were pivotal. From November 1998 onward, the “Integrated Health Program” was the cornerstone of Cuba's international cooperation. The intense cooperation with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela became another cornerstone. Complementary to the health programs abroad, Cuba also set up international programs at home, benefiting tens of thousands of foreign patients and disaster victims. In a parallel program, medical training is offered to international students in the Latin American Medical School in Cuba and, increasingly, also in their home countries. The importance and impact of these initiatives, however, cannot and should not be analyzed solely in public health terms.

Background and Objectives: Mangrove forests offer many essential ecosystem services, including the protection of (sub)tropical coastlines, their inhabitants, and the infrastructure from severe storms and tsunamis. However, mangroves themselves suffer severely from such phenomena. After such events, reforestation efforts are widely undertaken to facilitate the recovery of the mangroves. Many of these laborious activities, however, fail for a number of reasons. Material and Methods: In October 1998, the Honduran Island of Guanaja was severely hit by Hurricane Mitch, and, after the storm, almost all of the mangrove forests (97%) were rated as dead. Seven years after Mitch, a longterm survey on the regeneration of the mangroves started. Field samplings in six variably disturbed mangrove zones was conducted in 2005, 2009, and 2016. Along permanent line-transects, all living plant species were recorded for statistical analyses and for quantifying progress. In this paper, the focus is on the three most severely hit areas. In two of them, planting efforts were carried out while the third one was left to regenerate naturally. This setting allowed a direct comparison between natural and human-assisted regeneration processes under otherwise similar conditions and equally severe previous disturbance. Results: Reforestation measures were characterized by high mortality rates of Rhizophora mangle L. propagules planted predominantly. Some, however, surely survived and might have contributed to regeneration after the disturbance. In 2016, roughly two decades after Hurricane Mitch, low-growing Rhizophora mangle forests, with high ground cover, were found. Surprisingly, the area without any planting also witnessed similar mangrove rejuvenation in the same period. Conclusion: Findings on the recovering mangroves in Guanaja confirm the lessons learned from other mangrove rehabilitation measures: planting mostly fails and commonly does not accelerate the revegetation of disturbed forests. In naturally regenerating forests, recolonization may occur after a certain time-lag only if few diaspore sources survived in the surrounding; as soon as established mangrove plants bear propagules, a quick return to viable forests takes place, proving the high resilience of these coastal ecosystems.

Abstract. In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch triggered numerous landslides (mainly debris flows) in Honduras and Nicaragua, resulting in a high death toll and in considerable damage to property. The potential application of relatively simple and affordable spatial prediction models for landslide hazard mapping in developing countries was studied. Our attention was focused on a region in NW Nicaragua, one of the most severely hit places during the Mitch event. A landslide map was obtained at 1:10 000 scale in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment from the interpretation of aerial photographs and detailed field work. In this map the terrain failure zones were distinguished from the areas within the reach of the mobilized materials. A Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with 20 m×20 m of pixel size was also employed in the study area. A comparative analysis of the terrain failures caused by Hurricane Mitch and a selection of 4 terrain factors extracted from the DEM which, contributed to the terrain instability, was carried out. Land propensity to failure was determined with the aid of a bivariate analysis and GIS tools in a terrain failure susceptibility map. In order to estimate the areas that could be affected by the path or deposition of the mobilized materials, we considered the fact that under intense rainfall events debris flows tend to travel long distances following the maximum slope and merging with the drainage network. Using the TauDEM extension for ArcGIS software we generated automatically flow lines following the maximum slope in the DEM starting from the areas prone to failure in the terrain failure susceptibility map. The areas crossed by the flow lines from each terrain failure susceptibility class correspond to the runout susceptibility classes represented in a runout susceptibility map. The study of terrain failure and runout susceptibility enabled us to obtain a spatial prediction for landslides, which could contribute to landslide risk mitigation.

Long term monitoring of coral reefs on the northwest coast of Roatán, Honduras, has documented significant changes in coral cover over a seven-year period. Twenty photographic quadrats were permanently installed at approximately 12 m depth at each of three study sites located on the northwest coast of Roatán. Photographs were taken at six or twelve month intervals from 1996 through 2003. This observation period included a massive bleaching event which began in late-September of 1998, and Hurricane Mitch which struck in October of the same year. A measurement of projected surface area (PSA, cm2) was used to estimate total coral coverage. Changes in colony number, percent cover, species diversity and recruitment of all scleractinian corals were monitored within the quadrats. During the seven-year period, living coral cover decreased significantly from 30-34% to 17-20%. This represents net losses ranging between 32% and 50%. The greatest loss occurred in the year following the bleaching event and Hurricane Mitch and was largely due to the decline of the dominant reef building species Montastrea annularis, M. faveolata, and M. franksi. These three species accounted for 56% of total hard coral cover in 1996 and only 32% at the conclusion of the observation period. A sharp reduction in the total number of living colonies in the quadrats was observed with 217 of the 532 original colonies (41%) suffering complete mortality. While 117 coral recruits were identified during this period, recruitment mortality was high (40%) with only two cases of the massive frame building Montastrea species recruiting into the photostations. A combination of at least three factors have contributed to changes in the benthic community observed during this investigation: (1) the massive coral bleaching event in the fall of 1998 which disproportionately affected Montastrea spp.; (2) a category 5 hurricane; and (3) increased anthropogenic stress in the form of sedimentation and nutrient enrichment as the result of new and unregulated development.

Rising Food Prices and Undernourishment: A Cross-Country Inquiry Il welfare delle famiglie nei paesi in via di sviluppo e stato colpito nel periodo 2005-2008 dal drammatico incremento nei prezzi dei beni alimentari. Nel presente lavoro, si adotta un approccio di equilibrio parziale, al ne di analizzare l'eetto a breve termine della crescita dei prezzi dei beni alimentari basilari sul livello di nutrizione, considerato quale indicatore del welfare. L'analisi consiste nella costruzione dei sistemi completi di domanda di beni alimentari, per poi eettuare micro-simulazioni a livello delle famiglie. Invece di limitare l'attenzione su un singolo paese, si fornisce una panoramica piu completa mediante una analisi cross-country resa possibile dall'utilizzo di indagini sulle famiglie rappresentative delle rispettive nazioni. La confrontabilita dei dati tra paesi e garantita dall'adozione delle medesime scelte metodologiche nel trattamento dei micro dati. L'analisi evidenzia come l'incremento del prezzo dei beni alimentari non solo induca una riduzione nel consumo medio di energia alimentare, ma inoltre, peggiori anche la distribuzione delle calorie, compromettendo ulteriormente le condizioni nutrizionali delle popolazioni. Emerge, inne, come l'accesso a terreni agricoli svolga un ruolo cruciale nell'assicurare un'adeguata alimentazione nelle aree rurali come pure, sorprendentemente, in quelle urbane. Estimating the Heterogeneous Eects of Aggregate Shocks on Caloric Adequacy: The Case of Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua Gli esistenti studi di valutazione dell'impatto dell'uragano Mitch si sono n'ora focalizzati sugli eetti di breve e medio termine riscontrati su diversi aspetti sociali [la crescita del consumo delle famiglie (Premand, 2008), il benessere dei bambini (Baez & Santos, 2007), budget e scolarizzazione (Ureta, 2005)] attraverso l'analisi dei dati panel LSMS sulle famiglie nicaraguesi degli anni 1998, 1999 e 2001. Nel presente lavoro si analizzano gli eetti di piu lungo periodo, aggiungendo i dati relativi all'indagine del 2005 ai dati precedenti. Attraverso il metodo dierence-in-dierence, si sono indagati a distanza di 7 anni la persistenza degli eetti generati dall'uragano e della conseguente risposta umanitaria . Inoltre, andando oltre la semplice analisi dell'impatto medio, si e posta l'attenzione sull'eterogeneita degli eetti sulle famiglie. A tal ne, la stima dei Quantile Treatment Eects (QTE) e stata implementata sulla distribuzione della variabile d'interesse. Un ulteriore contributo apportato dal presente lavoro di ricerca e fornito dall'analisi dell'impatto dell'uragano su variabili intra-famigliari, avendo a disposizione solo variabili a livello di famiglia. La metodologia introdotta da Chesher (1997) viene qui estesa ad un set-up di valutazione dell'impatto, con l'obiettivo di stimare risultati specici per eta e sesso. L'obiettivo di tale approccio e anche 5 quello di far chiarezza sull'ecacia degli aiuti umanitari sul recupero del livello di benessere in essere prima dell'uragano. L'oggetto di interesse di questo capitolo e la nutrizione. Infatti, lo studio si pone l'obiettivo di stimare in modo dettagliato l'impatto avuto dall'uragano Mitch sull'adeguatezza del consumo calorico delle famiglie, intesa come rapporto tra il consumo di energia alimentare (chilocalorie) e il relativo fabbisogno minimo umano. La FAO e il principale produttore di studi ed analisi nazionali in materia di fame e sottonutrizione, riuscendo a coprire l'intero pianeta. La metodologia adottata ha il principale vantaggio di facilitare il confronto spazio-temporale tra paesi, ma ha anche la limitata capacita di identicare le cause dell'insicurezza alimentare all'interno dei paesi (FAO 2003, Barret 2010). La tendenza al rialzo dei prezzi, che ha caratterizzato numerosi beni di prima necessita tra il 2005 ed il 2008, ci ha spinto ad ampliare i principi della metodologia FAO, al ne di misurare l'impatto della crescita dei prezzi dei beni alimentari sulla sicurezza alimentare delle famiglie. L'obiettivo del presente capitolo e quello di fornire una descrizione dettagliata della metodologia applicata nei capitoli precedenti nella misurazione della sottonutrizione e, piu nello specico, dell'insucienza del consumo energetico, utilizzando le indagini sulle famiglie. Inoltre, il presente capitolo fornisce alcune linee guida utili per la misurazione della soglia del fabbisogno calorico specico per ogni famiglia, che sostituisca l'utilizzo di una soglia unica (generalmente, 2100 chilocalorie giornaliere per individuo). Lo sviluppo di un buon indicatore specico per famiglia sara estremamente utile anche nella conduzione di studi scientici solidi sulla valutazione dell'impatto dei programmi e delle politiche in materia di sicurezza alimentare nelle diverse aree del mondo.
Rising Food Prices and Undernourishment: A Cross-Country Inquiry Households' welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008. In this paper, we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short-time eects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments, as a measure of welfare. The analysis consists of rst approximating complete food-demand systems and then performing household level micro-simulations. Instead of focusing on a single country prole, we provide a more complete snapshot through a cross-country assessment made possible by the use of nationally representative household surveys. Comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data. We nd that food price increase not only reduces the mean consumption of dietary energy, but also worsen the distribution of food calories, further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations. We also discovered that access to agricultural land plays a big role in assuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas, and surprisingly, even in urban areas. Keywords: Food prices, food policy, calories intake, demand system, household surveys, cross-country analysis Estimating the Heterogeneous Eects of Aggregate Shocks on Caloric Adequacy: The Case of Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua Previous evaluation studies on the impact of the hurricane Mitch were focused on the short and medium-term average eects on dierent welfare outcomes [household consumption growth (Premand, 2008), child's wellbeing (Baez and Santos, 2007), household budget and schooling (Ureta, 2005)] using 1998, 1999 and 2001 LSMS panel data on Nicaraguan households. In this study, longer term eects are analyzed by adding the 2005 survey to the well-known dataset. We investigate through the dierence-in-dierence methodology if the eects of the hurricane and of the humanitarian response persist on average 7 years after. Additionally, we go beyond the standard average impact by focusing on the heterogeneity of the impact across households. For this purpose, the quantile treatment eect (QTE) estimation is implemented over the outcome distribution. Another contribution of this research is the analysis of the hurricane's impact on intra-household outcomes when only household-level data are available. The methodology introduced by Chesher (1997) is extended to the impact evaluation set-up in order to estimate age-gender specic outcomes. The scope of this methodology is also to shed some light on the short- and longer-term eectiveness of humanitarian response on the welfare levels. This chapter also focuses on nutritional attainment as the outcome of interest. In fact, the study aims to estimate in a comprehensive manner the impact of the hurricane Mitch on household caloric adequacy, which is dened as the ratio between the dietary energy consumption (caloric intake) and the minimum human requirements. Measuring Dietary Energy Deciency at the Household Level: A Methodological Note on the Micro-Analysis of Undernourishment FAO is the main provider of country-level estimates of undernourishment covering the whole world. Its methodology has the main advantage of facilitating comparisons across countries and over time, but also has a limited capacity to understand the causes of food insecurity within countries (FAO, 2003; Barret, 2010). The upward trends in global food prices, concerning many staple commodities between 2005 and 2008, stimulated us to extend the principles of the FAO methodology in order to assess the impact of rising food prices on household-level food security. The objective of this methodological chapter is to provide a detailed description of the methodology applied in the previous chapters for measuring undernourishment, and more specically dietary energy deciency at the household level. Additionally, this chapter provides some guidelines to construct household specic dietary energy requirements, instead of using a single threshold (generally, 2100 kilocalories per person per day) for all households. Constructing a good household-level indicator will also be useful to conduct scientically solid impact evaluations on food security programmes and policies in dierent areas of the world.

In August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew battered south-eastern Florida, causing fifty-eight deaths, and more than $27 billion in property losses (National Climatic Data Center 1999). The following year, widespread flooding occurred within the Upper Mississippi River basin, inundating 5.3 million hectares during the worst flood to affect much of the region in this century. The Northridge earthquake (magnitude 6.7) led to sixty-one deaths and more than $20 billion in property damage and loss in 1994. A year later, Kobe, Japan, experienced a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. Despite massive efforts to prepare for such events, more than 6,000 lives were lost, and $150–200 billion in property damage was experienced. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, Nicaragua, and other parts of Central America. More than 5,600 people died in Honduras alone and approximately 70,000 homes were damaged. In Nicaragua, more than 850,000 people were affected, with approximately 2,860 deaths. Estimates of losses in agriculture, housing, transportation and other infrastructure are in excess of $1.3 billion dollars (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 1998). These are just a few, albeit particularly devastating, events that continued to focus our attention in the 1990s on hazards and disasters. The widespread news media coverage of these disaster events provided a backdrop for fictional portrayals as Hollywood rediscovered the disaster movie genre. With enhanced special effects and big-named stars, popular films such as Twister, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Titanic, and A Civil Action added a different slant to the media coverage of disasters and the public’s perception of hazards throughout the decade. The public’s interest and fascination in actual disasters also propelled several books to the bestseller list (Barry 1997; Junger 1997; Larson 1999). Both the fictional representations and the consequences of real disasters illustrate the shift in our understanding of the forces at work in such events. Some of the damage in Hurricane Andrew, for example, is attributed to inadequate enforcement of building standards. In Kobe, structures engineered to withstand seismic activity failed, prompting concern about just how safe infrastructure is in tectonically active areas. And Hurricane Mitch’s devastating toll cannot be explained solely by the storm. Decades of land abuse and a combination of social, political, and economic factors combined with the storm to cause the severe losses.

Abstract Hurricanes are usually thought of primarily as wind storms. Virtually all metaphorical use of the word hurricane in literary works evokes violent wind. Yet some of the worst tropical cyclone catastrophes are caused not by winds but by torrential rain. Curiously, some of the most devastating floods are produced by tropical cyclones of sub-hurricane strength. A recent and especially tragic example is that of Hurricane Mitch of 1998, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since the Great Hurricane of 1780 (Chapter 11). Floods produced by Mitch killed more than 11,000 people in Central America, and the president of Honduras declared that Mitch destroyed 50 years of progress in that country. Mitch developed as a rare Category 5 hurricane in the central Caribbean, with sustained winds in excess of 175 mph. It drifted slowly southward over Honduras and neighboring countries, producing rainfall rates of 1 to 2 ft per day and precipitation totals of as much as 75 in. The resulting floods and mud slides virtually destroyed the entire infrastructure of Honduras and devastated parts of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize, and El Salvador. Whole villages together with their inhabitants were swept away by the resulting flash floods and mudflows.

This chapter explores how US foreign policy interests have shaped responses to disasters and disaster-driven migration in Central America, focusing in particular on Hurricane Mitch’s impacts on Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998. In the aftermath of Mitch, the United States invested billions in rescue and relief operations not just out of humanitarian concern but because aid and reconstruction protected the fragile peace secured in the early 1990s, after decades of wars in the region. The US foreign assistance package for Central America involved offering Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans who were already living in the United States at the time of the disaster, many of them in the country without authorization and facing deportation. Over the next two decades, the federal government repeatedly extended TPS for Hondurans and Nicaraguans, but despite their long presence in—and ties to—the United States, many have not found a pathway to citizenship. In the two decades following Mitch, economic development policies designed to assist Central America’s recovery have also produced slower-onset disasters that have reinvigorated migration rather than stemmed it.

Hurricanes have a profound effect on many coastal ecosystems. Direct impacts often include wind damage to trees, scouring and flooding of river channels, and salt-water inundation along shorelines (Simpson and Riehl 1981; Diaz and Pulwarty 1997). In some areas, secondary impacts may include landslides triggered by heavy rains (Scatena and Larson 1991) or catastrophic dry-season fires resulting from heavy fuel loading (Whigham in press). This chapter will focus on the longterm impacts of hurricane wind damage at two LTER sites, the Harvard Forest (HFR) in central New England and the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LUQ) in northeastern Puerto Rico. These two sites, both located in the North Atlantic hurricane basin and occasionally subject to the same storms, provide interesting examples of tropical and temperate hurricane disturbance regimes. Wind damage from a single hurricane is often highly variable (Foster 1988). Damage to individual trees can range from loss of leaves and fine branches, which can significantly alter surface nutrient inputs (Lodge et al. 1991), to bole snapping or uprooting, which can significantly alter coarse woody debris and soil microtopography (Carlton and Bazzaz 1998a and b). At the stand level, damage can range from defoliation to individual tree gaps to extensive blowdowns, creating different pathways for regeneration (Lugo 2000). At landscape and regional levels, complex patterns of damage are created by the interaction of meteorological, topographic, and biological factors (Boose et al. 1994). Adding to this spatial complexity is the fact that successive hurricanes are not necessarily independent in terms of their effects. A single storm lasting several hours may have effects that persist for decades (Foster et al. 1998). And forest susceptibility to wind damage is strongly influenced by composition and structure, which in turn are strongly influenced by previous disturbance history (Foster and Boose 1992). Thus, the impacts of a single hurricane may depend in part on the impacts of earlier storms as well as on other previous disturbances and land use. Hurricanes, like other disturbances, both create and respond to spatial heterogeneity (Turner et al. 2003). To understand the long-term ecological role of hurricanes at a given site, we must consider these three sets of questions: (1) What is the hurricane disturbance regime?

This report examines evidence from post-Mitch Central America and disasters in other parts of the world to identify the ways disasters affect women and to highlight women's participation in prevention, relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts. This report is based on background papers prepared on the effects of Mitch and past disasters on women, and inputs from a technical meeting with government and NGO representatives of the four countries directly affected by Mitch -El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua- and Costa Rica, which suffered indirect impacts. The report was prepared for and presented at the meeting of the Consultative Group for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America which took place in Stockholm, Sweden on May 25th-27th, 1999.

This paper provides a summary of conflict management issues and options in the challenging cultural, ecological, economic and social context of Latin America and the Caribbean. Dealing with conflicts is one of the greatest challenge facing integrated coastal management because most of these systems involve not only property rights, fishing rights, and use rights, but they also usually involve common property resources as well. This study argues that conflict management, starting with a careful analysis of potential conflicts in the early stages of project preparation, should become an explicit component of integrated coastal management. Case studies for the Bay Islands in Honduras, the Gulf of Fonseca, and the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua (Pearl Lagoon area), all areas affected by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, are presented.