People in the Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 523

death, severe damage, and disruptions. Yet people keep moving back, as the benefits far
outweigh the costs of disaster in the long term. The primary means of mitigating risk in
such areas today is by monitoring volcanic activity, eruption warnings, and evacuation
of people and their mobile property. In places where there are relatively predictable
paths of lava and pyroclastic flows, structural controls and land use prohibitions (zon-
ing) have been successful mitigation methods. Naples, Italy, is not usually thought of as
a mountain metropolis, but it rests on the lower slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, and together
they represent one of the highest disaster risk areas on Earth, the mountain having a
well-documented record of explosive eruptions and the metropolis having about 5 milli-
on people and structures sprawled over ground made from the remains of earlier pyro-
clastic and lava flows, ashfalls, and scoria.
FIGURE 10.18 One of many hotels, restaurants, and shops constructed following the 2008 Wenchuan
earthquake and subsequently destroyed by August 2010 debris flows and floods, Longmenshan,
Hengduan Mountains, Sichuan, China. (Photo by J. S. Gardner.)