A Risk Management Framework for Disaster in Korea: Application to Disaster Damage Scenario Planning

On October 29, 2022, a tragic crowd crush incident occurred in Itaewon, Seoul, South Korea, during Halloween celebrations. 159 people died. In addition to this incident, South Korea has been experiencing new types of disasters that were previously unencountered. South Korea considers disasters into natural and societal categories. Natural disasters refer to calamities caused by natural phenomena, such as typhoons, floods, and heavy rainfall. Social disasters, on the other hand, include incidents such as fires, collapses, explosions, and large-scale traffic accidents, which can lead to significant damage and paralyze national functions. 

Accordingly, South Korea government manages large-scale safety incidents that can arise not only from natural phenomena but also from the malfunctions of social systems. Particularly, cascading and complex damages, such as physical damage caused by typhoons leading to power outages due to accumulated impacts, are treated as critical management concerns. To effectively manage and analyze risks at a national level, it is essential to incorporate the characteristics of natural and physical phenomena occurring within the country, along with measures to mitigate their intensification, into a risk management framework. This requires a framework capable of multidimensionally assessing the potential risks and cascading impacts of disasters, enabling a comprehensive risk management approach.

Therefore, this paper proposes a complex disaster risk management framework that leverages a risk management framework to comprehensively analyze the cascading and complex risks and damages of disasters, considering the characteristics of disaster risk management in Korea. Disaster safety management in South Korea focuses on identifying and mitigating various risks, including societal impacts such as dam breaches, road disruptions, and power outages, in anticipation of hazards like typhoons. To effectively manage these risks, it is necessary to conduct a systematic evaluation of the potential extreme damage scenarios that may result from these hazards. For instance, in the case of Seoul, which is exposed to super typhoons with strong winds and heavy rain, disaster management requires not only preparedness for the primary impacts of typhoons but also for secondary impacts scenarios that may result from the initial damage. In other words, a risk management framework is needed to analyze the cascading effects on other facilities when vulnerable facilities in the exposed area are damaged and these damages are considered secondary hazards.

This study proposes a framework that redefines the damage resulting from the interactions between the vulnerabilities of exposed areas (or facilities) and the response capacity of the state or facilities as a secondary hazard(or new risk factors) thereby enabling the management of complex and interconnected disaster risks. This proposed risk management framework allows for a detailed analysis of the causal chains leading to disaster-related damages and facilitates the reevaluation of previously considered impacts as secondary hazards, enabling the identification of complex and cascading risks. The proposed risk management framework is intended to be integrated into a web-based system in the future. This system will enable users to visualize the causal interactions among hazard factors, exposure, damage (as new hazards), response capacity, and vulnerability.