• Title/Summary/Keyword: Environmental Damages

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SO2 Concentrations and Health Damages under Alternative US-EPA Policies (US-EPA 정책하에서의 SO2 농도와 건강피해)

  • Hlasny, Vladimir
    • Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.393-430
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    • 2009
  • This study uses a computable partial-equilibrium model of the U.S. energy industry to evaluate sulfur dioxide concentrations under two environmental policies. The policies, generator-level emission caps and tradable allowances, are selected to yield identical aggregate emissions. Regional concentrations are found to vary across the two policies significantly. These variations translate into different losses for individual states, and, nationwide, to differences of hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate health damages. Emission caps outperform allowances by $452 million. Caps favor the southwestern, south-central and southeastern states, where they deliver $840 million lower damages than the other policies, while they deliver $390 million higher damages In northern and northeastern states.

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River Water Environmental Management System by Construction of Early Warning System - A Comparative Study on Korea and Japan.

  • Kang Sang-Hyeok
    • Spatial Information Research
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    • v.12 no.4 s.31
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    • pp.329-337
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    • 2004
  • Typhoons Rusa (2002) and Maemi (2003) struck Kangwon and Gyeongnam provinces of Korea and caused the most extensive flood damages ever blown since the foundation of Meteorological Agency in 1927. Many cities are inundated, crippling the critical facilities and resulting In high irreversible losses of human lives, and damages to infrastructures. These kinds of flood damages were among the worst natural disaster that Korean people experienced. In order to reduce flood damage, it is necessary to investigate how to use the information of water environment during the rainfall disaster. Therefore as per the result of this study, we have suggested few but effective countermeasures for controlling the flooding damages and also the advancements in the areas of disaster information dissemination and early warning system for water environmental management by using optical fiber system in Japan are discussed.

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The Problems of Administrative Relief of Humidifier Disinfectiant Injuries and Its Reform (가습기살균제 피해의 행정구제의 문제점과 개선방안)

  • Park, Taehyun
    • Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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    • v.45 no.4
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    • pp.310-320
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    • 2019
  • Objectives: The purpose of this study is to identify the causes of the retardation of administrative relief under the Special Act on Remedy for Damages Caused by Humidifier Disinfectant and to suggest the systematic refurbishment of this act for the quick and fair of relief of damages. Methods: This study was conducted through the application of the case study, literature review and systematic interpretation of law methods. Results: The disease subject to administrative relief under the Special Act is defined as health damage causally associated to a substantial degree with exposure to humidifier disinfectant. This definition is a strict requirement in light of the legislative purpose of prompt and fair relief of damages. Furthermore, the damage relief committee established under the Special Act judged causal relationships according to a rigorous standard in terms of medical certainty. This medical evidence-based judgment is a result of the committee's failure to understand the normative meaning and function of a causal relationship as an outcome of inference based on empirical rules and common sense. Conclusions: Humidifier disinfectant health damage should be defined as a health-related injury capable of occurring or deteriorating after exposure to humidifier disinfectant (HD). If the fact that a particular injury occurred or worsened after exposure to HD was found, then the damage can be presumed as being caused by HD. However, this might not be the case when the injury was considered to have occurred or been exacerbated entirely due to other factors.

Variation in wind load and flow of a low-rise building during progressive damage scenario

  • Elshaer, Ahmed;Bitsuamlak, Girma;Abdallah, Hadil
    • Wind and Structures
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    • v.28 no.6
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    • pp.389-404
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    • 2019
  • In coastal regions, it is common to witness significant damages on low-rise buildings caused by hurricanes and other extreme wind events. These damages start at high pressure zones or weak building components, and then cascade to other building parts. The state-of-the-art in experimental and numerical aerodynamic load evaluation is to assume buildings with intact envelopes where wind acts only on the external walls and correct for internal pressure through separate aerodynamic studies. This approach fails to explain the effect of openings on (i) the external pressure, (ii) internal partition walls; and (iii) the load sharing between internal and external walls. During extreme events, non-structural components (e.g., windows, doors or rooftiles) could fail allowing the wind flow to enter the building, which can subject the internal walls to lateral loads that potentially can exceed their load capacities. Internal walls are typically designed for lower capacities compared to external walls. In the present work, an anticipated damage development scenario is modelled for a four-story building with a stepped gable roof. LES is used to examine the change in the internal and external wind flows for different level of assumed damages (starting from an intact building up to a case with failure in most windows and doors are observed). This study demonstrates that damages in non-structural components can increase the wind risk on the structural elements due to changes in the loading patterns. It also highlights the load sharing mechanisms in low rise buildings.

City Information Model-based Information Management of Flood Damages (도시정보모델의 침수피해정보관리에서의 활용)

  • Park, Sang Il;Kim, Min-Su;Kim, Jong Myung;Lee, Sang-Ho
    • Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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    • v.28 no.4
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    • pp.385-392
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    • 2015
  • Open city information model can increase the understanding of the situation, enable the effective reuse of information due to access the semantic and relational conditions of objects, and support the reliable decision-making through linking with external references. The city information model focused on terrain and buildings was implemented based on the actual data. In addition, a process for flooding simulation was proposed using hydraulic analysis data and the city information model. The deaths and damages were estimated by flooding simulation. The availabilities were examined by detailed queries and responses based on model data of the city information model, hydraulic analysis data and the estimated damages.

A hierarchical semantic segmentation framework for computer vision-based bridge damage detection

  • Jingxiao Liu;Yujie Wei ;Bingqing Chen;Hae Young Noh
    • Smart Structures and Systems
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    • v.31 no.4
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    • pp.325-334
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    • 2023
  • Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

Impedance-Based Damage Diagnosis on Bolt-Jointed Structure Under Varying Temperature

  • Shim, Hyo-Jin;Min, Ji-Young;Yun, Chung-Bang;Shin, Sung-Woo
    • Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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    • v.31 no.3
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    • pp.260-270
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    • 2011
  • The electromechanical impedance(E/M)-based method detects local structural damages based on variations of electrical impedance signatures which are obtained from piezoelectric sensors bonded to the structure and excited in high frequency band. In this method, temperature changes may result in significant impedance variations and lead to erroneous diagnostic results of the structure. To tackle this problem, a new technique providing a 2-dimensional damage feature related to the temperature information is proposed to distinguish the structural damage from the undesirable temperature variation. For experimental tests to validate the proposed method, damages are introduced by bolt loosening to a bolt-jointed steel beam, and impedance signals are measured under varying temperature conditions through a piezoelectric sensor attached on the beam. A freely suspended piezoelectric sensor is additionally utilized to obtain temperature information indirectly from resistance signatures. From a relationship between the damage index (from a constrained sensor) and the temperature (from a freely suspended sensor or a temperature sensor), damages can be detected more clearly under varying temperature compared to other conventional approaches.

Development of a structural inspection system with marking damage information at onsite based on an augmented reality technique

  • Junyeon Chung;Kiyoung Kim;Hoon Sohn
    • Smart Structures and Systems
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    • v.31 no.6
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    • pp.573-583
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    • 2023
  • Although unmanned aerial vehicles have been used to overcome the limited accessibility of human-based visual inspection, unresolved issues still remain. Onsite inspectors face difficulty finding previously detected damage locations and tracking their status onsite. For example, an inspector still marks the damage location on a target structure with chalk or drawings while comparing the current status of existing damages to their previous status, as documented onsite. In this study, an augmented-reality-based structural inspection system with onsite damage information marking was developed to enhance the convenience of inspectors. The developed system detects structural damage, creates a holographic marker with damage information on the actual physical damage, and displays the marker onsite via an augmented reality headset. Because inspectors can view a marker with damage information in real time on the display, they can easily identify where the previous damage has occurred and whether the size of the damage is increasing. The performance of the developed system was validated through a field test, demonstrating that the system can enhance convenience by accelerating the inspector's essential tasks such as detecting damages, measuring their size, manually recording their information, and locating previous damages.

Biological Distribution by Water Temperature and Refocus on the Theory of Critical Environmental Variation Quantum (수온환경변화에 따른 생물분포와 어업피해결정을 위한 임계환경변화량이론의 재조명)

  • Kang, Young-Joo;Kim, Ki-Soo
    • The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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    • v.45 no.1
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    • pp.1-16
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    • 2014
  • The study attempts to show that the theory of critical environmental variation quantum(CEVQ) has a sound logical basis and empirical support. It is well known that the theory of critical environmental variation quantum is derived from the theory of biological probability distibution function and the central limit theorem(CLT) in statistics. The study uses the case study of fisheries damages compensation caused br the public marine construction undertaken in the area do Anjeong Bay in the city of Tongyeong for empirical test of theory of CEVQ. The results shows that the CEVQ theory perfoms a good job in measuring quantatively fjsheries damages caused by outflow of cold water due to the operation of LNG company since 2002. Therefore the study proves that the CEVQ theory is a good theory having internal consistency and empirical applicability.

A Study on the Estimation of Remaining Fisheries Damages Considering the Recovery Periods of Fisheries Resource after the Completion of Undertaking Yeongsan River Project (영산강 살리기 사업 이후의 자원회복기간을 고려한 잔존어업피해추정에 관한 연구)

  • Choo, Hyun-Gi;Jo, Mun-Kwan;Kim, Ki-Soo
    • The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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    • v.51 no.4
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    • pp.1-18
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    • 2020
  • The paper aims to explore existence and degree of remaining fisheries damages after the completion of undertaking the Four Major Rivers Project focusing on the case of Yeongsan river. The paper seeks to show the necessity of consideration of periods of fishery resources recovery in the estimation of ex-post fisheries damages of the project by inferring the analysis of the annual variation of environmental indicators in the river. Therefore, the paper suggests three years of remaining periods of fisheries damages of the project utilizing the variation trend of ex-ante and ex-post annual output data of inland fisheries in Jeonnam province and individual catch of fisheries. In the measurement of the annual degree of fisheries damages during periods of fishery resources recovery, the paper attempts to suggest the method of comparision of day catch data per vessel between ex-ante and ex-post periods of the project, which were investigated by the same institute. Here the paper tries to make correction of ex-post catch data for holding the same catching condition as ex-ante situation by adopting the concept of competitive intensity of catching which was derived from the decreasing rate of number of fishing households in the area of Yeongsan river.