World Water Day with a Spotlight on Seismicity - Brazil
José A. S. Fonsêca (Ph.D. student at UFRN / Brazil) says: In Brazil, at the same time it concentrates the largest percentage of drinking water in the world, it is not exempted from geohazards such as induced earthquakes and risks of contamination. For instance, on the one hand triggered events have been already recorded with magnitudes as large as 4.2 mb in the past. On the other hand, in recent years a collapse of a tailing dam caused death of people and severe contamination of a watershed, whose recovery capacity is still a matter of debate. This draws not only attention to facilities stability but also to societal safety, once poorly built buildings are not rare, and the distribution of potable water is not equal. In this regard, the key word is “monitoring”. Once it is not possible to predict any occurrence of disaster, geohazard monitoring plays a paramount importance for intelligent water reservoirs usage. Measurements of humidity, soil vibration, displacements, spatial-temporal analysis, and many other observations help to increase the understanding of the problem, thus mitigating potential threats to society and environmental impacts.
