James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, D.C., will deliver the keynote address at a national workshop in Boulder on July 11.
Witt will speak on the opening day of the 24th annual hazards research and applications workshop hosted by the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The workshop, which takes place at the Regal Harvest House Hotel, features speakers from universities and other agencies around the United States and from as far away as Australia, Nepal and England.
The workshop runs from July 11 through July 14 and comes toward the end of the United Nations-sponsored International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, which has focused world attention on extreme natural events.
Topics for discussion include the Oklahoma tornadoes, earthquake early warning systems, flood forecasting, hurricane Mitch in Central America, business vulnerability, Y2K and a look at how natural disasters are portrayed in popular culture.
Mary Fran Myers, co-director of the Natural Hazards Center at CU-Boulder, said the issue of integrating hazard mitigation into sustainable development will be an underlying theme at all sessions during this year聮s workshop.
"The debate will focus on how proactive approaches to reducing damages from natural disasters can also contribute to a community聮s overall economic vitality, environmental quality, inter- and intra-generational equity, and general quality of life," she said.
Those attending the three-day workshop also will be asked to think about the future and consider what organizers describe as the "troubling question" of why losses from natural disasters continue to rise.
Myers suggested one reason for this was that people had come to rely too heavily on technology, for example in such cases as the construction of earthquake-resistant buildings or the accuracy of extreme weather forecasts.
As a result, she said, this tends to lull people into a false sense of security, since no building near an earthquake fault is totally safe from the seismic hazard, and no forecast is 100 percent accurate.
Myers said some approaches to natural hazards were shortsighted and were merely postponing catastrophic loss for future generations.