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| Titel |
A nineteenth century avalanche episode reconstruction via historic newspapers: from unstructured information to standardized information |
| VerfasserIn |
Cristina García, Jesús Ruíz, David Gallinar, Covadonga Sánchez de Posada |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2014
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 16 (2014) |
| Datensatznummer |
250094061
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2014-9393.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Several climatic risks studies based on the analysis of data recorded in newspapers have been
published to date. These studies deal with both general (Moltó, 2000; García y
Martí, 2000; Hernández Varela et al., 2003; Olcina, 2005) and specific risks such as
landslides (Domínguez et al., 1999; Devoli et al., 2007; Polemio y Petrucci, 2010)
seastorms (Yanes y Marzol, 2009) and snowstorms (Olcina y Moltó, 2002) among
others.
The purpose of this paper is to report on the methodology and results of the study of an
extreme historical event happened in the Asturian Massif (Northern Spain) in 1888. Special
attention has been paid to methodological aspects and to the difficulties found in
the goal of devising a method that would enable the reconstruction of this kind of
phenomena on the basis of nivometheorogical conditions, geographical location and
socio-economic impact. To a great deal we focused our efforts on designing a logical
database structure and a set of tables that would allow us to store and cross the information
for statistical analysis. This includes outlier detection in order to ensure the quality of the
results.
The information sources used in our study have been the issues of the daily newspaper
“El Carbayón” and the weekly newspaper “El Oriente de Asturias” published in Oviedo and
Llanes (Asturias) between the 20th of January and 30th of May 1888. A total of 92
issues have been collected via the hard copy microfilm housed in the Central Library
of Asturias. We reviewed 70 reports relating to avalanche events happened in the
aforementioned period of time. We grouped the consequences of the events into 3
main categories (personal injuries, material damages and absence of both) and 5
child categories (deaths, wounded, house and attached building damage, livestock
injuries, damage to infrastructures and communications). We gathered data about the
thickness of snow-cover, the number of consecutive snowstorms and, in order to
facilitate a territorial analysis of this episode, we also gathered data about the event
locations.
The primary difficulties we found were lack of information about some details (dates,
geographic locations and frequently inaccurate quantification of damage), fuzzy terms or
sentences (such as “heavy snow”, “we have never seen a snowfall like this”, “huge
snowslide”, etc.) difficult to turn into crisp data, and difficulties in defining categories and
allocating every incident into one of the categories. Many of these problems are limitations
inherent to work with an information source whose purpose is to describe events for general
public and not to write about them for scientific purposes. Others are due to the nature of the
climate phenomenon associated to these events. These difficulties are increased, on the other
hand, by the lack of development existing at the time which often resulted in villages being
isolated by the storms with the ensuing, delays in communication, transportation,
etc.
The results of our study show the importance of the 1888 avalanche events, caused by
three linked and consecutive snowstorms that took place between the 14th of February 1888
and the 22th of March 1888, creating snow covers with a depth ranging between 5 and 7
meters. Sixty six avalanches were documented, 60 of them causing material damage. The
number of dead and wounded reached 37 and 23 respectively. The consequences of the event
were felt throughout the Asturian Massif; 14 high- and mid-elevation mountain
municipalities, were affected by avalanches, some of which displaced 40.000 m3 of
snow.
In this research, historical media has turned out to be a particularly valuable source of
information for the study of this kind of episodes, because it enables us to understand the
scope of events that occurred in the distant past in remote locations whose socio-economic
impact cannot be directly inferred from instrumental data. On the other hand, we consider
studies like the present one as preliminary steps for avalanche episodes modelling.
Indeed, the information gathered with this kind of methods has to be supplemented
with that obtained from other techniques and field geomorphological evidence. |
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