Colima volcano exercise: planning, development and lessons learned.
Licensed under
Category
Published on
Abstract
VUELCO conference - Barcelona (Spain), 8th March 2013
In the context of Work Package n.9 "Decision making and unrest management", Task n.9.6 "Simulation of unrest and decision-making" is aimed at the organization of four simulation exercises at different target volcanoes, through the four years of project duration.
According to the decision of the Steering Committee, the first exercise was held at Volcan de Fuego de Colima (Mexico) on November 2012, in coincidence with the 7th edition of the international congress "Cities on Volcanoes".
The main purpose of these exercises is to explore the applicability of models, methods, protocols and procedures, developed within the other workpackages, to unrest crises.
Products to be tested in an evaluation-decisional-operational chain, are mainly the probabilistic models for eruption prevision and the communication protocols for the interaction between scientists and decision-makers and for the information to the exposed population.
With this presentation we describe how the exercise was planned, including the definition of goals and of different phases, elaborated in strict conjunction with the UNAM, the CENAPRED, the Colima University and the Civil Protection of the States of Colima and Jalisco.
We also illustrate the development of the simulation exercise through the scientific meetings, the information assemblies with local people, the decision making process and the final evacuation drill. Finally we try to draw out useful indications in order to capitalize the experience for the next exercises.
Through the development of simulations to different volcanoes, in dissimilar social, cultural and economic contexts, we aim at the improvement of products (models, procedures, etc.) in order to get, at the end of the project, to the definition of best practices for the management of real unrest crises worldwide.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows: