Disaster Response

The historical disaster is an issue of historical geography, but also a prominent real problem, it is important to explore its academic and practical significance. The related formerly historical research on Ankang region was much concentrated on refugee problems and mountainous region's development during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. As to the research of natural disaster and environment problems in the region in history was only few fragmentarily parts that involved into other topics so that none of wholly detailed and systematical works or papers on it. Say nothing of the research of the government's rescues after disasters. It is why this paper focused on this topic. Seeing from the historical geography angle, the paper take the historical disaster restoration as a key, with reading and analyzing local chronicle material of Ankang region of Qing Dynasty, to inspects the historical region disasters and their causes, characteristics, spatial-temporal distribution, influences and the government's disaster relives measures.The paper includes four chapters with the main contents as follow:The first chapter: Brief Introduction of the topic selection and the main design of the paper, including the academic significance of this study, the basic concept of the time and space selection, the present research achievements about the academic field, and the main materials and methodology used to this study.The second chapter: General environment condition of disaster region and its influences. This part studied the backgrounds, conditions and the affects of each kind of disasters including of flood, drought, earthquake, gale disaster, hail disaster etc., and also discussed the natural and humanities environment of that time in the region. The characteristics of these disasters are repeatability and incidental and regional imbalance. The disasters usually happened frequently and covered large scale with deep affect. And the main cause of these disasters was social factor such as massive refugees rushed into the region and explored slope wasteland even disafforestation. As to the disaster influence showed negative and positive aspects. The negative ones were: serious population casualties, bad damage of city, garrison, peasants' houses and water conservancy facilities, even the distortion of populace's ethics and disordered social systems. The positive one was the sprout of people's realization of environmental protection resulted from the frequently disasters.The third chapter: The characteristics and causes of disasters taking flood as a case study. The flood occurred much frequently than others so that it was one of the most typical and threatened disaster in the region during Qing Dynasty resulted by rainstorm. Looked at its spatial-temporal distribution, In the earlier period of Qing Dynasty, the flood mainly covered the counties of Ziyang, Baihe, and Xunyang. In the middle stage of the dynasty about over a century, few flood occurred. In the late period, the flood occurred much more frequently again with larger area cover and deep influences. Speaking of the flood discontinuity, the earlier period is stronger than the later period, and to the happening times, the later period more than the earlier period. The flood occurrences repeatedly has harmful influences on people's living and property security such as the grain underproduction, the roads washing away, the land and buildings submergence, the population reducing, the environment problems. And the causes mainly involve the nature and the social in which the latter is more obviously. The natural factors were climate, landform, surface covering, and rivers hydrology condition etc.. And the social factors were the activity of "Refugee" including the population growth and the distribution condition and the reclamation policy. The refugee "inrushes" resulted into large-scale human activities which tremendous influenced the region environment, as the most one was change of the landscape from the natural one to the humanity one. And also the big impact on the regional ecological environment, problems such as soil erosion and disasters frequently happening such as flood did.The fourth chapter: The government's countermeasures to disasters. As to the process of post-disaster relieves, several steps were ordered such as reporting, disaster damage evaluation, victim population calculation and disaster relives. And to the detailed measures, there were also several forms, such as comfort and compensation, tax remits, levying postponing, disaster relieves, rice price lowering, contributes, loaning, stop grain storing, refugee nestling and disaster prevention. It can be obviously seen that the late Qing Dynasty, the disaster countermeasures and prevention methods had already formed quite perfectly with fixed procedure and systematical legalization. Speaking of the disaster prevention, the measures involved many aspects. In this paper, two aspects were elaborates which are the rice storage and the water conservation. First, each kind of rice storehouses was discussed including their size, belonging and function. Second, the water conservancy facilities' function was also studied. The larger water conservancy facilities which could irrigated land area more than 1000 acres operated well; The quantity of water conservancy facilities with the function of irrigation and water storage kept growing resulted by the refugees' inrush and cultivation. And more and more mountainous dykes were established with smaller size.