1.3.4 Management of Tropical Storms - Reducing the Effects

Tropical Storm tracked by satellite

Monitor

• Using technology to identify the formation of tropical storms and track their paths and strengths.
• Satellites monitor the cloud pattern and can detect as the winds become more organized, into a spiral pattern and the eye develops.

Prediction

• Scientists use computer models that use data from satellites to calculate a path for the storm.
• Scientists use radar and aircraft to help monitor and predict the path of storms. Predicting the path gives people time to evacuate and board up homes.

Planning

• Future developments, e.g., new houses, can be planned to avoid the areas at most risk.
• Emergency services can train and prepare for disasters, e.g., practicing how to rescue people from flooded areas with helicopters.
• Governments can plan evacuation routes to get people away from storms quickly. Actions taken before a hazard strikes to reduce its impact, such as educating people in evacuation plans, can reduce deaths.
• Families are encouraged to plan what they need to do and have in the event of a tropical storm: Disaster supply bag, fuel in vehicles, know where evacuation shelters are, storing loose objects.

Protection

• Build hurricane-proof homes and installing storm shutters on houses, e.g., in Florida.

• Sea walls can be built to protect key infrastructure from storm surges and storm drains can be designed to take away heavy rainfall.

• Tropical cyclone shelters in Bangladesh have helped reduce the death toll from 500,000 deaths in 1970 to 4234 in 2007.

  

• Houses built on stilts to allow storm surge to pass underneath.

• Salt marsh, wetlands, and mangroves replanted provide natural protection from storm surges. (These ecosystems are often destroyed to make way for agriculture and building development).