Geological Hazard

Geological Hazards are naturally occurring or man-made geologic conditions capable of causing injuries or other health impacts, loss of property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage. It had been divided into many types. The two main types of man-made geological hazards are collapsing of buildings and forest fire which happening recently. Now, I’m going to talk about the collapsing of buildings first. The structure of a building actually is fundamental to ensuring the safety of people in or around the existing buildings.

However, human’s ignorance, negligence and greed lead to building collapse. Human ignorance has to do with when incompetent personnel are in charge of design, construction or inspection. One of the major areas of negligence is in specification writing where that of a past project is adopted without crosschecking those areas that need improvement, addition or omission. Greed on the part of building contractors like diversion of building materials, cement in particular, the use of sub- standard materials so as to achieve high profit.

Moreover, foundation problems, quality management, material and testing variability and unprofessional conduct will also leads to building collapse. The effect of building collapse are the innocent citizens lost their life, many other people has been rendered permanent disable in one form or the other as a result of increasing rate of building collapse in the country. Economic problem of this incidence is immeasurable in that many have been rendered homeless with loss of countless properties.

Here is the true incident which happens in Bangladesh when 24 April 2013. At least 76 garment workers have been confirmed dead in Bangladesh after an eight-story building containing clothing manufacturing units collapsed. Moreover, this is another true incident collapse of a 20-metre lighting arrester pole from the UMNO building in Jalan Macalister during a storm and caused casualties is the best example of fallen misfortune which happen on 15 June, 2013 at Penang. It is a man-made disaster, instead of a natural disaster or accident.

And a person had been killed in this incident. The other man-made geographical hazard is forest fire. Forests are important to us and our environment, their benefits cannot be measured. Without forests humans cannot survive. Fires can have a positive or negative effect on forests; and its impact on forest health and dynamic change greatly in different ecosystems. Fires are sometimes essential for forest regeneration but also harmful if it is repeated systematically in the same area.

Forest fires have terrible environmental, social and economic consequences. The causes of forest fire are including drought, human carelessness, lightning, heat waves, slash and burn farming. The most common cause nowadays is probably due to drought. Tropical forests are quite sensitive to temperature change, thus long dry seasons and higher temperatures can severely damage a healthy forest and leads to forest fire. The next common cause is probably lightning and the last major cause of forest fires is to open oil palm plantation for own benefits.

The main consequence of forest fire will be releasing of carbon dioxide which will affect our health and it increases the atmospheric pollution. Furthermore, an increase in carbon dioxide means an increase in global warming. When global warming rise the “Greenhouse” phenomenon will being increases also. Other than that, shelter for animals is not provided anymore. Animals are immediately affected when they are killed at the duration of fire and indirectly when no more food is available. Lastly, the forest products will be destroyed, such as wood, food and medicines.

Recently, smoke from forest fires in Indonesia has choked neighboring Singapore and Malaysia, prompting Singaporean officials to press Jakarta for urgent action against the haze that has pushed the city-state’s air pollution to the worst level in 16 years. Its main air pollution index hit a measurement of 401 at midday Friday, exceeding previous highs of 371 on Thursday and 321 on Wednesday. Those measurements were classified as “hazardous” and can aggravate respiratory ailments. The reason why the firm burn the forest is to open oil palm plantation for own benefits but they didn’t consider for other.