A new act on Disaster Management has been introduced in South Africa that will shift
the focus of Disaster Management to a pro-active approach. The new Disaster
Management Act, Act number 57 of 2002, states that all Municipalities should provide
for: âAn integrated and co-ordinated disaster management policy that focuses on
preventing or reducing the risk of disasters, mitigating the severity of disasters,
emergency preparedness, rapid and effective response to disasters and post disaster
recoveryâ.
Because of this it is important to identify areas that are at risk of any disaster and to
introduce mitigating measures to ensure that any foreseeable impacts on the community
are limited as much as possible. It is thus important that a disaster risk assessment must
be performed for every Municipality that can be used in the planning process.
A great deal of information needs to be gathered and analysed in the risk and
vulnerability assessment process. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provides the
ideal platform from which to analyse large quantities of environmental, demographic,
cadastral and infrastructural data and represent it spatially and in a format that is easily
understandable to everyone.
GIS has proven to be a very important tool in disaster management, from identifying hazards and vulnerable communities, to providing information during disaster events and
the recovery process afterwards. It is also a very effective method of gathering and
storing data from different fields and applications to be used for planning mitigating
measures, setting up standard operating procedures for disaster events and coordination
and planning in the event of a disaster.
The purpose of this study was to gather all available information on identified hazards in
the Madibeng Municipality and to use this information to perform a risk and vulnerability
assessment of the Madibeng Local Municipality with the aid of GIS.
The information provided in this study was intended to assist in building a disaster
resistant community by sharing geographic knowledge about local hazards. This study provides information to the Municipality of Madibeng on hazards and people at risk and
vulnerable to different hazards.
Recommendations were then made to the Madibeng Municipality on the application of
GIS in hazard and vulnerability assessments, that should provide the Municipality with a
cost effective and scientific method of addressing Disaster Management related
functions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-10042006-104636 |
| Date | 04 October 2006 |
| Creators | Stols, Martin |
| Contributors | Prof NJ Kotze |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-10042006-104636/restricted/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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