| Rock avalanches, debris flows, and snow avalanches are sliding and flow processes,
subsumed under the term “extremely rapid mass movements”. These processes pose varying
degrees of risk to land use, infrastructure, and personal security in many mountainous
regions. Despite increasing efforts to quantify the risk in terms of potential damage or loss of
life, most previous studies have achieved partial rather than total risk solutions. These
short-comings were addressed within the EU FP6 project IRASMOS (“Risk Management of
Extremely Rapid Mass Movements”), completed in May 2008 and including 8 partners from
Austria, France, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland. IRASMOS attempted to review, evaluate,
compare and augment methodological tools for hazard and risk assessment extremely
rapid mass movements, crossing borders between hazard processes and between
countries.
IRASMOS was subdivided into 5 work packages, including forecast and warning
procedures, technical counter measures, hazard mapping, vulnerability, and risk management
methodology.
An international harmonization in all fields addressed by the IRASMOS work packages
would be desirable from several perspectives, e.g. from the point of view of internationally
comparable risk levels or from the point of view of system interoperability under cross border
hazard situations. As the project IRASMOS showed, the present state and the future
possibilities of harmonization are very different between different risk management aspects
as well as between different hazard processes. E.g. while snow avalanche forecast and
warning is harmonized throughout Europe, the harmonization has not reached the same level
in, e.g., hazard mapping.
In the talk the present state of risk management for extremely rapid mass movements is
assessed, the main shortcomings and possible lines of further development are discussed. |