Critique of "Risk Maps" by Anna R.

Hello, again. Today must be your lucky day, a double dose of Mike Talkin is what's in store for y'all. Once again, I surfed the net for a blog other than mine, and came across Anna's. Overall I loved all her blogs and will recommend it to everyone I know. The link for the specific blog I chose to critique is http://act-alr.blogspot.com/2009/03/risk-maps.html . The title of this blog is "Risk Maps" and concerns how to go about making a risk map and their use by companies. First, I'd like to explain as best as I can my understanding of the risk map. This will be followed by a short critique of Anna's original blog.

Risk maps help define the certainty of occurrence, using the measures of severity and frequency of risks. Financial, operational and business risks are just a few controlling factors in a business’s success to which mapping would define the most efficient way to prevent these risks. Various forms exist to assess different types of uncertain risks. The risk map is important for assessing “high-stakes” risk. Unexpected risks are the most incorrectly mapped because of their low frequency.

Flood mapping is a very common risk management procedure because it provides the basis of the amount of coverage needed on commercial and residential buildings. FEMA is a government agency which manages risk in daily assessment of property values in a flood zone or flood prone areas. This allows proper coverage on a building and its contents in case of a flood which can cause substantial property damage and unpaid claims. They hire cartographers and engineers to determine special flood hazard area and risk zones. The NFIP, National Flood Insurance Program, uses FEMA’s risk assessment in the flood plan management program consisting of FIRM’s, SFHAs (Special Flood Hazard Areas).

Risk Maps exist to help improve the ecosystem and the environment by assessing factors such as insects, disease and mapping forests to measure the life and death rate of trees. The Geographic Information System database derives evaluated information for the improvement of healing the problems forests tend to have. This process is a “long-term” Forest Health Monitoring program analysis which compiles data into risk maps and models. Forest risk mapping allows more accurate predictions to which forests are prone to drought and fire. Defining these occurrences caused by insects or disease lowers the risk of forest and possibly home consumption by disasters such as massive wild fires and disease outbreaks caused by insects.

As far as Anna's take on the topic, I can't say I disagree with much. I do however disagree with her stance on the correlation between seasonality and car accidents. The weather is tied to certain seasons, which would therefore make the higher rate of accidents in winter correlated to winter itself. The snowy weather is a defining characteristic of winter in a lot of places. I don't think anyone is trying to say that the months of December to February are inherently more likely to have more car fatalities for the simple fact that they are those months. Those months have the bad weather, therefore I don't think it's incorrect to say that the season and car accidents are correlated.

Additional Sources:
http://www.shelterislandrisk.com/resources/documents/RiskMapsMadePractical.pdf
http://www.msc.fema.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/info?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1&content=productFIRM&title=NFIP%20Flood%20Maps&parent=productInfo&parentTitle=Product%20Information
http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/sustain/conf/abs/lewis.htm