Introduction - Extreme Events: A Physical Reconstruction and Risk Assessment - page 16

that these events do tend to cluster over various periods and do not, therefore,
occur entirely randomly. This is the crux of the limiting assumptions made
in so many natural hazard risk assessments. Hopefully, the synthesis of this
topic as presented in the final chapter will convince many practitioners of the
need to adopt a geological and long-term historical approach, together with the
mathematically rigorous approaches of engineering and physics, to reducing
risk from natural hazards.