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| Titel |
Natural hazards and decision-making in the most densely populated country in the American continent: a 20-year perspective |
| VerfasserIn |
Celina Cruz Martínez, Jose Cepeda |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2010
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 12 (2010) |
| Datensatznummer |
250043972
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| Zusammenfassung |
| With a population density of ~300 per km2, El Salvador is the most densely populated
country in the American continent and the capital, San Salvador, is probably the city in the
Americas most frequently hit by natural hazards, earthquakes in particular. As a consequence
of a magnitude 5.4 earthquake in 1986, 1500 people were killed, with as many as one-third of
these casualties associated to the collapse of engineered structures, a high rate compared to
contemporary figures worldwide. Four years earlier, during a long precipitation period in
September 1982, a debris flow was triggered from the summit of the San Salvador volcano
and travelled ~4 km for about one hour before it killed up to 500 people in an
area to the North-West of the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador (AMSS). This
same area had been previously hit by a similar event 50 years earlier, but with no
consequences at that time since it was uninhabited. These are only some examples of
the main facts that motivated the creation of the Office for Urban Planning of the
Metropolitan Area of San Salvador (OPAMSS) in 1990. This institution is an autonomous
municipal organisation whose functions and attributes comprise the planning and
control of urban development. After 20 years of the foundation of OPAMSS, this
paper presents its history and evolution, the main achievements and challenges,
focusing on how the institution has been shaped by some key milestones, such as the
earthquake-triggered landslide at Las Colinas neighbourhood in January 2001, which killed
~600 people in the Western AMSS, and the widespread flooding in October 2005 after
the urban drainage network collapsed during Hurricane Stan. The development of
OPAMSS as a key organisation in land use management and decision-making is an
example that illustrates how the integration of technical and legal aspects can be
oriented towards the improvement of governance at the scale of metropolitan areas. |
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