Natural Disasters

Friday's one-year anniversary of the crash of Continental Flight 3407 will almost certainly trigger anxiety and fear among those personally affected by the tragedy. And a University at Buffalo expert on trauma and loss says those with a less-immediate, but still important connection to the tragedy can also expect a recurrence of anxiety or grief.

In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, University at Buffalo geography students are participating in a global effort to enhance the international response and recovery effort by helping to assess damage, using images hosted by Google Earth and the Virtual Disaster Viewer, which shares imagery of disasters from various sources.

Days after arriving in earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince, a team of French-speaking structural engineers led by Andre Filiatrault, PhD, University at Buffalo civil engineering professor and director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), headquartered at UB, was appointed by the United Nations as its interim lead coordinating team for organizing and initiating building assessments.

The powerful aftershock that hit the already devastated city of Port au Prince on Jan. 20 has only intensified Haiti's need for French-speaking structural engineers who can immediately determine which of the structures left standing may still pose a threat to human safety.

The University at Buffalo's world-renowned earthquake engineering faculty, and the internationally diverse students who come here to train in this critical field, are always intensely interested in any earthquake that occurs. But for Pierre Fouche, who is working on his doctorate in earthquake engineering, the earthquake in Haiti had enormous personal significance. Fouche is Haitian and his family lives there.

The effective use of multiple layers of intelligence gathering, including existing behavioral identification programs, could have excluded the murderous Farouk Abdul Mutallab from travel before he got anywhere near Northwest Flight 253.

The secret to the flight of the hummingbird and other tiny birds and insects lies in the looping, swirling flow of air, called a vortex, that their flapping wings create. These aerodynamically unconventional flows are the inspiration behind new research by a University at Buffalo scientist who hopes to understand the nature of the three-dimensional vortex formation process so that it can be optimized.

Alan J. Rabideau, PhD, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering at the University at Buffalo, has been named to a National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council panel that will study hazardous waste sites with "recalcitrant" contamination that hinders their closure.

University at Buffalo professors involved in the UB 2020 strategic strength in extreme events are lending their expertise to media this week during the Vigilant Guard exercise organized by the New York National Guard and state, regional and local officials.

Dead zones in critical waterways, accelerated loss of arable land and massive famines. They're all caused by the 24 billion tons of soil that are lost every year to erosion, a phenomenon that costs the world as much as $40 billion annually. But predicting where erosion occurs, and thus how to prevent it, is a serious challenge. That's why University at Buffalo geographer Sean Bennett has constructed various systems to model it.