This conference has been fundamental in the growth, the information exchange, the energy, and the joy in this industry. That created a problematic for me as how to introduce these next speakers. So I decided to skew a bit mythic. At first I thought tricksters, you know, brilliant, creative, but there were too many negatives with tricksters even for me. So I decided to create a mix of three different mythic archetypes. The jester, who live life in the moment in full enjoyment. The creator, who realize vision. And the magician, who make things happen based on a deep fundamental understanding. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your hosts, Ashkan and Graham. So this is our last year hosting the Float Conference. And it's made us think about a lot of things as we've been going through this. And first of all, we're incredibly thankful. We're happy to be here. We're happy to be on this stage one last time. And we're excited that all of you are here with us. Yeah. It's absolutely a pleasure. And it has been for seven Float Conferences now. And a lot of you may have heard that this is our last time doing the Float Conference, at least as Float On, which is a lot of what this talk is about right now. And so of course, people just are asking us all the time, why aren't you going to do it anymore? Which is something that we ask ourselves. It's an interesting question. And it was hard for us to come to this decision, as you can imagine. We spent a lot of time talking about it. We debated a lot of different back and forths. Even from the point where we felt pretty good about our decision, it still took us a long time to really pull the trigger and make it happen. But there's a couple of reasons we settled on this and actually felt like this was the time for us to stop organizing this. And one of the biggest ones is just that we can't do it forever. I mean, first of all, we're not going to live forever. So that's actually impossible. But secondly, it's just not something that a single organization can really maintain and certainly not float on. So the idea of creating a system for it to be able to carry on well beyond us and hopefully better than us is kind of our goal. And at that point, we had to realize that if it's not going to go on forever, we, as a logical conclusion of that, have to decide at what point we're going to stop doing it. And through talking to each other a lot, we basically came to the understanding of realizing who we are, which is fundamentally restless people. We just like new projects. We like really big learning curves at the beginning of things. When we do something for a really long time, it isn't the same to us as that thrill of that just early stage, which maybe you can tell by the fact that we have like five businesses that we run. So our idea is to turn it into a nonprofit and give ownership of the conference over to the industry, which is what a lot of our talk will be about in just a second. But in the meantime, we thought it might be worthwhile to get all sappy and emotional about the last seven years of float conference and kind of relive some of the past of the event. So let's go back and talk about how this all started. It started like how all of our projects started to float on because we thought it sounded fun. And also because we had gone out to Mark Frickel's float summits, which were definitely fun, so we knew it was a good time. The first one, of course, being in London, which sadly we did not get to go to, but which I hear was an amazing gathering anyway. And then after that, we went to Sweden and got to be at that float summit that was there and basically just got so wrapped up in the excitement about being around all those float people that we pretty much spontaneously, with only moments noticed on stage there, asked everyone if they would be interested in coming to Portland for a conference. So that's how that decision was made. Yeah, you should never make really important decisions when you're in stage high, just like right there in front of people is what we learn. So we'll be launching it now. But you know, a lot of it sounded really fun to us. We were really excited about showing everybody Portland and just having a party in the city that we think is really cool. Yeah, getting to show off float on and show our business to everyone. At the time, there really weren't that many larger float tank centers and ours was only four tanks at the time, but it was still amazing to just have the chance to have people out and check out what we built. And we were hungry for information, just like everybody in the industry was and still is. And the idea of getting to facilitate something where research is presented and information spreads was really exciting to us. And largely, I mean, we were still fresh as a business and we hadn't been in the float industry that long and we just wanted to contribute how we could. We found this amazing industry and we wanted to give back to it and do more than just run a float tank center.  So we did it. In 2012, we put on the first float conference here in Portland and we basically had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Yeah, from the time that we were in Sweden announcing this spontaneously on stage to putting on our event was actually only six months. And between that, we just kind of announced it on stage and then we kind of went back and forth about whether we were crazy and should do this for another two months. So it was really only four months of planning we had before we put on the first float conference, which for comparison, we kind of start parts of planning for these conferences now, a year and a half beforehand, so before the last conference has even happened. And of course, the conference happened and we were completely exhausted and we made a lot of very critical mistakes. For example, we gave ourselves a full three hours to do our entire setup for the entire event. For comparison, we do three days of setup now. It was only when attendees started to arrive on the first morning that I was like, are we supposed to put the name tags into the name tag holders before they get here? Is that a thing? The answer is yes, yes. You should definitely do that early, not when guests are arriving, if you're curious. And we were under construction. Our shop was going through the biggest renovation it had ever done and we were actually expanding and putting in two more tanks at the time that the conference was being hosted. So when they went on the float on tour, they were actually just walking through hallways of black plastic and large construction sites. Like, isn't our shop cool? Like, isn't it, are you guys not impressed? But we did it and it was an incredible time and it filled us so much with joy and it was so much fun to have everybody here that we were hooked and we wanted to do it again. So quickly from 2012, we started to put these on as an annual event. Yep, and from 2012 we actually had about 165 people out compared with the many hundreds of people that we have now. We're obviously in a much smaller theater. Of that, actually, we only had 31 float tank centers who were in attendance compared to the vast amount of active centers that not only exist now but take the time to come out here and join us in Portland. And things started growing pretty quickly and with that growth, we also grew as people who started to learn how you're actually supposed to plan events. So, for example, here was our logo for the 2012 float conference. You good? Yeah? Minimalist, we'll say. By 2013, switched to the kind of more familiar logo that you know now. Over the years, we started adding on more sections to the event. We started doing the Friday activities and adding on workshops and things like a bus tour full of beer around Portland's float centers. We did a CPO course taught by Jake Marty who we pretty much forced to get certified as a CPO instructor, which at the time he did it was the youngest CPO instructor out there. And we started making way cooler lunches, sending people to the farmer's market or having a bunch of food carts come and give people more of an actual taste of the place that they are instead of just eating some sort of catered food. More parties, like the party tonight, like the one we had on Thursday out at Float On, like the Rogue. We actually turned it from our initial Saturday night reception into now kind of a series of parties running throughout the entire conference after hours. And we've learned a thing or two about decorations as well. This was our first conference. That was pretty much the extent of our set up. You'll notice we do still have the podium of power and we had it from the very beginning, so that stayed through. And we've just gotten to be in cooler places, you know, like this building here. And actually our 2013 conference was in the other theater in this building and I remember getting a tour of that place when I was first walking through here and I was like, what else is in this building? And they took me in here and I remember looking up and seeing everything and being like, one day. You'll also notice at some point we got castle banners, which was a great addition. This is all Ashkahn's idea, as were the capes. Which funny story there, we actually developed because we realized our staff often had to run around like crazy in order to get things accomplished and we're like, how do we make this look cool instead of frantic? We've gotten to do some really, really cool stuff over the years. We did a balloon drop, or three balloon drops if some of you were counting.  And you know, we were really into doing big stunts on stage and of course there's all sorts of things that we thought of over the years that we never had time to do, like firing a t-shirt can in or... getting a sword fight.   So, this kind of is a nice little reminder of how things got started and really it brings us up to the present of the float conference. Which is this? Yeah, you're here. It's happening right now. Yeah, that's here right now. And that brings us to the future of the float conference. Some things never change. So, this obviously required a lot of thought. You know, we've had many, many conversations over well over the course of a year before this point discussing what to do, what to do with the future of the float conference. And we thought of a lot of things and honestly where we settled is a large part because of eliminating the other options that were out there. So, obviously probably the most clear thing to do would be just sell the conference to someone who wants to purchase it and keep putting it on. And there are in fact just whole companies out there that host conferences that know nothing about floating that we could turn it over to. And it would almost certainly just get really lame and turn into a generic event. And even though that would bring us personally the most money, it absolutely was kind of immediately stricken from the table because it just felt wrong. We thought about having another single organization in the industry run it. We even reached out to a few people and pretty much all of them were like, what? No. That's what we were talking about. We can't do that. Yeah, I think Verbatim, a couple of them said, can we not do it, but also say you can't stop? And of course, that was the other option, was just not doing it anymore. But that also didn't feel right to us. I feel like we've built a lot of momentum and I love seeing all these people here every year. And the idea of it just completely not going on anymore was a little too hard of a reality to come to. So, ultimately what we are going to try to do, like I mentioned before, is turn it into a nonprofit and give that ownership of the conference over to the industry, over to a group of people and perhaps even a rotating group who can keep it going, if not indefinitely, hopefully for a long time to come. And so we know what you're thinking at this point, which is probably, you guys are crazy, that's definitely not gonna work. And it makes sense, you know, it's hard to... It's hard to run things with big groups. You know, it's hard to run things with people who are geographically separated from each other. It's hard to just plan logistics and operations when you have that many voices involved. These are all real challenges that we definitely recognize. And as a result of recognizing that, you know, we've also put thought into trying to figure out how it might work. What could we set up in place that would help curb the things in there that felt like big roadblocks? The things that would most certainly become the most challenging when turned into a structure like that? So we have a pretty broad structure and there are some really nice things about the Float Conference specifically and being a non-profit based around an event that work in our favor. So before we get into details, let's just kind of cover the broad strokes. A board of directors. Obviously. A paid staff, volunteers, and a local liaison or multiple liaisons. This is kind of our general structure for how we see the kind of workforce that goes into the conference going on. And there's a few reasons before we get into the details of this that we think are kind of acting on the benefit of the conference. To help this be, you know, to get off the ground as a non-profit and not hit too many roadblocks. One of which is that it already has a source of income. You know, it makes a lot of sense to pay for tickets and come here. So that kind of step of the process is finished. It has a clear infrastructure already. We've worked over many years to develop exactly how to run things and how to make things function and how to deal with large groups of people. And we've learned a lot of mistakes along the ways and we've documented it really well. You know, we have good sets of plans and understandings and what we do throughout the year to put an event like this on. And we have a lot of resources already at our disposal.  And you know, we've been slowly collecting these things over these years that will become assets for the non-profit to give it a head start. And really in addition to that too, I think one thing that's pretty useful is there is an extremely concrete deadline, which is pretty nice, right? Like this, like you said at date, and then it has to happen. Like hundreds of people are about to show up and you better be ready for it. And those kind of concrete external deadlines that are just on a non-negotiable, I think are really good ways of making sure things get done. So a little bit about the board of directors and what we picture them doing. You know, mainly I think a lot of the people who are capable of being on the board and who would be great contributors and who have been around the float industry for a while and have the connections that'll make running the conference a little easier are also really busy. They're the people who are manufacturers and who run centers or multiple centers and have their own jobs and lives and sometimes kids. And so for us, we really wanted to make sure that at least in our plans, the board of directors is not in charge of the day-to-day operations and organizing the conference so much as they're in charge of all of the big decisions and kind of guiding the course of things. Because that's really what you need that kind of deep float knowledge and expertise for. You know, having people who are deciding things like the speakers that are coming and who we're inviting, you know, making big decisions about perhaps what city the event is going to or deciding to change the structure of the event and change days around or add other tracks. You know, those kind of big almost taste decisions in the event is something that benefits from having people who are the kind of pillars of our community have a say and be involved and make sure they're guiding that. And really the goal is to try to have the work that that board of directors has to do really be nothing other than having phone calls and having those conversations and basically not having any homework because I don't think it'll get done. Just having conversations on the phone, making those decisions and then being able to go on and run their businesses and keep up with the rest of their lives is the main way that I saw a group of people like that being able to be involved. So we're going to rely a lot on paid staff for the kind of in and out, year in and year out operations that go into putting on an event like this. And the nice thing is we do have paid staff right now and some of them are happy to continue and excited to help this move into the next stage of what it is. And we really sat down and thought about this and tried to figure out what it was.  And we kind of broke it down into a list of very concrete jobs we think are necessary to put this event on. There's having someone be a copywriter. There's a lot of just written material that needs to happen for the conference from writing video descriptions to email newsletters to content for the website and editing people's bios. So that's kind of a job that can happen throughout the year. And speaking of the website, there's just general website development. You know, you need to build these systems and list out speakers and program that in HTML and CSS. So just general website design, plus some fancier stuff and upgrades and maintaining the whole web presence. Someone needs to be able to take care of the social media and connecting with people, running advertisements, spreading the word, you know, running those accounts and keeping up with them, putting out all the amazing content that happens every year here at the event. And PR, you know, spreading the word both out to the media and internally within the float community, just making sure that everyone knows about the conference and that it's able to not only sustain but grow over time. Graphic design ends up being a huge, huge part of putting this event on. I think we've printed our logo on tens of thousands of objects at this point and someone having someone who can quickly manipulate that and get all those files ready and send them off for all the printed materials and everything that we do is definitely a task that needs to happen throughout the year. Video editing, pretty self-explanatory. We record a lot of videos. Speaker wrangling is kind of its own job. All these people you see on stage here are pretty difficult people to track down. I constantly have to email them being like, hey, I haven't heard from you in like three weeks. I really need that PowerPoint. So like that takes a lot of time. And same thing for sponsorship sales, you know, actually getting people to come out and get boots and check in and make sure that they're okay and line all of that up is no small task. There's a lot of booths out there in the lobby and that's a really cool part of the event, being able to come to the conference and see what's available there and add new retail items to your float center and see what new items even exist that might make the life in your business easier. And it's hard, it takes a lot of effort to get all those people. I don't know how many people have realized that float tanks are very difficult objects to move in and out of buildings. But we bring a lot of float tanks here every year and then they all have to go away rapid fire. Customer service, again, I'm sure that all of you have been in contact with our team with Ash Khan and Jeanine and Jocelyn and have received many emails back and forth and that's necessary and it's part of what I think makes this conference run so smoothly is just really active communication. Yeah, and there's also just the world of, you know, running any sort of business, the kind of professional services that you need, things like a bookkeeper, an accountant, a nonprofit lawyer in this case, an HR person, those kind of people that you're hiring probably just on retainer for the advice when you need it. And of course, and separate from a lot of the year round paid staff, just people to come and work the event itself. The paid staff that go year round are much, much smaller than the hordes of people that we need to come out and run registration and move tables and set up lunches and kind of everything that goes into organizing this. And there's about four or five people that spend throughout the year working on this event and then we go up to a group of maybe like 50 to 60 people for a week and then we shrink back down so it's a really extreme ramp up and ramp down. And the nice thing about this list for paid staff is it's pretty comprehensive. This sitting down and actually going through every single thing that we do for the conference other than what we intend for other people. This is almost all of it. So it's a pretty discreet list of tasks that need to get done. And all of this really pairs in with the idea of having volunteers. You know, this is all work that can be paid and we can find people who do these things for a living and we can pay them and that will be part of the budget and the expense of running an event like this. Or if there are people in this room that have this experience in it, maybe you do have past sales experience, maybe you've done graphic design before you switched to being in the float world. This is a really great way to help the industry. If you have a skill set and you wanna volunteer, you can help make this event better because you know about floating and you're gonna care about it more. You can help make it cheaper for everybody either by volunteering your time or just giving the conference like a really awesome rate because you're gonna get in for free and you wanna help it out. So any amount of effort that people put into this is just gonna make the event smoother and easier to run. Yep, and that includes everything from the planning to just coming out during the actual days of the event and lending a hand then. And the last one on the kind of big list of four categories is the local liaisons, which is the people who run float centers in the cities that this conference will be going to. One of the things that we very much picture happening with us not specifically running it as float on is it moving around and changing cities. And as a result, I think that the people who are involved in those specific cities really get a chance to shine and step up and maybe even kind of submit their city as an application for the next place to have the float conference. Be like the float Olympics. Yeah, so start planning like 10 years in advance, yeah. And stuff like that would be really helpful. Being able to just let people know where the cool spots are in town and make a place more familiar is a really useful thing to have. And this is what we've put together here is really what we think is necessary to form the structure for this event. And this is what we've come up with is kind of our best plan and we really sincerely hope that it will work. But honestly, it's not something we've ever done before. We've never tried to put on something in such a big collaborative way or to do a project that doesn't have a discreet company at its head leading it. So we're not entirely sure it will work, but this is where you come in. Basically, we need your help. If we wanna put this event on, we're hoping that people are willing to contribute and willing to reach out to us and willing to be a part of it so that this can continue. Yeah, and one really nice thing about the act of transitioning this is although we go all out for the conferences that we throw as float on, I don't know if you've noticed. We, it doesn't have to be like that.  As we've said many times in other speeches, you know, we fundamentally run isolated businesses and a chance to come together and gather and celebrate that and what we do is absolutely what makes the conference magical and that can be done on a much smaller scale that's much easier to run. So keeping it simple, especially in the beginning of kind of turning over the reins is not necessary but probably makes it more likely to happen. And the last thing we think is really gonna help make this a reality is the fact that we'll still be here. We're not disappearing. We're very much planning this in our minds is something that we're intending on helping transition. You know, we're one of the reasons we came to this decision and came to it kind of early is because we wanted to make sure we had enough runway for ourselves to be able to help it go into the next stage. So it's not like on Monday, we're gonna be like, all right, see you guys. Like good luck with that whole flow conference thing. Like we'll be around and we're gonna help in that year to try to get this thing set up and working. Yeah, absolutely. And onto just some specifics, which is how to apply if you are interested in volunteering or just helping out or even just learning more about what we're doing, getting involved. It's actually really easy. You just need to email us. And you should all have this because it's the email you've been receiving all of the notifications about the conference from. So yeah, should be simple.  So we're really excited to see how it transforms as we start getting feedback from you guys. Yep, and we're really relying on it. I mean, although we're saying that you can keep it simple, one of the cool things is the structure also means that although the baseline is pretty easy to actually run an event. Once you transition it over to a hotel, maybe you do have more catered meals, things that normal events do, but still getting together together, it allows for a nice infrastructure to build on. And ultimately, just depending on who wants to get involved, this can be even grander than we put on. And it's probably even more likely to make that possible just as a result of having more hands and more brains involved. There are of course other ways you can help too other than just taking on one of these jobs. Reach out to us. Let us know if you have certain skills we didn't think of, if you have a way to contribute to this that isn't in our vision because all that together is gonna help make this happen. Yeah, maybe you have a couple grad students who want to contribute or... All right, so the biggest thing to do though is just keep coming out. The magic of the Float Conference truly is you. It's all of us getting together. And the biggest way to obviously support this event into the future is just to keep on coming, gathering, having fun together, celebrate. Because that really is what this has been about. For us and for everybody here, and we've seen the importance of this and that's why we want this to continue. And we've seen the impact that this conference has had over the seven years that we've been putting it on. And just to kinda, as we've been thinking about everything that the Float Conference has done, we thought it'd be fun to put together some information and actually see if we can figure out some numbers on what the conference has accomplished over the years. So we found some fun stats to run by you guys. Yeah, so we've had people come out from 37 different countries to attend the Float Conference. That is the amount of people that we have trained at our workshop. So prospective center owners who have come through and gotten much-needed float knowledge through coming out to the conference. Over the years, we have had 45 float tanks hauled out to Portland and set up for two days and then removed. And nine of those have been total debut float tanks that have never been presented anywhere else before. We have 52 different types of AV adapters to make sure we're ready for anything. I've been thinking about making them into like a little utility belt or something like that. And now I treat them as little collector's items. I'm like, ah, yes, micro DVI to HDMI, nice, very, very rare. It does, you kinda feel like a superhero when you can just connect anything to anything else.  The 3,850 PowerPoint slides. Over seven years, we have spent $46,689.33 on coffee. Is it sad that that's the loudest applause we've gotten so far today? They're drinking a lot of coffee, that's right. And $3,200,000 invested by our predictions into the local economy. Yeah. And this one I'm really happy about because we really do go out of our way to try to have the money from this event go back into the local economy. We specifically do things like have lunch at local food carts or the local farmers market or support local companies in town when we're buying our materials as opposed to going with large catering companies or national organizations to rent things from. So because of that effort, and it's really cool when you get to go to a local company in Portland and be like, hey, I need to get like 700 of these. Is that okay? And it's great. You get to actually see the impact of it right in front of you. 107 permits that we've pulled from the city in order to put on these different events. Every time we put on a lunch or close the street down there or have amplified music anywhere, all of that is an application process and multiple pages of permits that we have to fill out and get approval from from the city. 700, this is my proudest stat.  Makes me so happy. Sometimes at night I just flip through those. And over the years we have compiled 72 terabytes of video footage. And perhaps the most important, there have been 2029 unique attendees. So people who have made the long journey very often all the way out to Portland to gather together. And while statistics are fun and enjoyable to look at, really the things that we've gotten out of this conference much more than a bunch of fun numbers are the kind of amazing memories we've had. We've just done really cool stuff and had really amazing people come beyond the stage and present information to everybody. So that's things like having all of the past presidents of Iris, the early research association come out and actually talk on the float conference stage. I'm also a silly registration photo up there. Just like to point out. We actually pulled out one float researcher, Jeffrey Bruno, out of retirement from float research. I went through the old research books one year and I looked at the top, like the first pages and all the research names in there and I just saw if I could hunt these people down. And I started just like Googling them and trying to find who they were and just reaching out. And most of them did not have any existing emails anymore because these were books from 30, 40 years ago. But this guy answered me and he was like, I haven't thought about floating in years and came out to the conference and had such a good time that it like wrapped him back into getting involved in float tanks. One of my favorites from events that we put on up here on the stage was just seeing new researchers getting to discuss science with all of the historical researchers, the people who kind of paved the way. And that's really magical to be able to host an event that brings together not just the community but people who are so influential and lets them actually dialogue and share information in front of all of you. We've had a number of unique pieces of artwork created over the course of this event, live artists painting artwork and that we've raffled or just given away to people in the audience over the years. I know that we've been saying it forever. On this stage, we actually got to see proof that we entered the theta waves during the floats which is amazing. We also got to see manufacturers helping other manufacturers put their float tanks together when they arrived which is just one of my really fond memories is watching somebody like, oh yeah, let me help you with that and like putting the other person's tank together. Just really seem to symbolize that kind of feeling of community we all have here. We're in such a cool industry. Also, we got to see a float tank given away on stage by Peter O'Brien, which is amazing. We got to get pranked by Tom Fein. Many times, but. Many times. One time he finished his presentation and he walks off stage and he tells me, Ashkahn, I have to get back on stage. And I'm like, Tom, there's somebody speaking. Like, you can't go back on stage. And he's like, I left a huge bag of weed under the podium. Like, I have to go get it. And we're like, and he's like, just kidding. Just kidding. So, we're gonna put this up online in retaliation. Yeah, yeah. Take that, Tom. Yeah. We've also just gotten to see the development of Libra, the Laureate Institute, and Justin Feinstein. And this started with some dude named Justin sending me an email and saying he really wanted to come check out floating because he was interested in it. And I was like, all right, who the heck is this guy? And now he's doing all this amazing research and publishing studies and presenting the data for the first time here on stage. And we've just gotten to see the birth of that entire thing happen every year and get updates on that. There have, of course, been amazing speakers that we've had out, amazing speakers like Aubrey Marcus. Duncan Tressel and Christopher Ryan. Yeah, Rick Doblin, of course, was amazing to have here. And maybe just bringing you back to a little bit of a more small local scale. One of my favorite things is that it's probably the most time that I actually spend with other local float tank centers is during the conference. So it's actually bringing together just our local Portland community of float centers is amazing. Yeah, we call ourselves the float mafia here in Portland when we all get together. Another one is just getting a chance to hear personal stories like Murphy's, like Emily Noren's, talking about her eating disorder and seeing her get a standing ovation on stage. This actually, afterwards, she took a little mental snapshot of that moment and that always stuck with me. Like somehow her clicking her imaginary camera kind of took a photo in my brain. So that was actually kind of a special moment for me in the conference as well. And honestly, just getting to be around all of you guys and party with you guys and hang out and have fun conversations and communicate in a way that's not over the phone or over email or over social media where everything's just about communicating and getting down to business and getting information across. Just getting to chit chat and hang out and have fun and feel like we're friends instead of just some sort of industry collaborators. And it's so often. I mean, when we went on this float tour just from having conversations and consulting with so many people, the amount of people who say that coming out to the float conference and nothing to do with us, but the vibe of the float conference being around center owners, getting to see what the community is like is what ultimately made them take the plunge, what inspired them to open centers. How many of you decided to open your center after coming out to a float conference? Yeah, a good number. And that's really important. Events like this and getting together mean that our community can continue and grow and inspire the future generations who are going to open the next wave of float centers. And of course, the connections. You know, that's what this is about, the connections that are made here. And over the years, we've got to hear just some really, really amazing stories about connections that have happened at the float conference. One of my favorites is Rick from Third Wave magazine and Float St. Louis. Before he was with Float St. Louis, really wanted to open a float center. Thought he like flew here from St. Louis to this conference thinking he would meet someone cool here and then just move to whatever city they happen to be in. And then met the guys from Float St. Louis and was like, oh, well, great, let's do that then. Which is amazing. Of course, Art of the Float with Dylan and Amy, they kind of met and decided on that collaboration here at the float conference as well, which having a weekly podcast that's been going on for so long for an industry our size is a great boon. And it's amazing that this in some way was able to contribute to that. We've had people not be able to make it but send one of their staff members and then in their head, they were like, oh man, that staff member's not coming back. And that was exactly what happened. The staff came here, met some cool other float center owners and then just went to work at their float center in a completely different city. I know more than one couple who has had their honeymoon at the float conference and at least one couple who actually met at the float conference and got married afterwards. So, conclusions? This has been a really amazing experience for us and we're happy that you guys have trusted us to put this on for so long and of keep coming back and of keep supporting this event and us through the years of us spending many countless nights putting this entire together. Yeah, thank you, thank you so much. It means a lot and it's been an absolute honor to be trusted by you to host this event over the years and hopefully we've lived up to that trust and put on a good show. But mainly, especially in turning the ownership over to the community, we're really excited for what the future holds. And I think we actually finished our talk early, which almost never happened, so. A couple extra minutes, huh? Yeah, maybe take questions or? I got, hold on, I got an idea. One second, hold on a second here. Okey-dokey, yeah. I'm not being able to fire a T-shirt gun thing, it's been kind of bothering me, so. I thought as long as this is our last time I maybe I'll give it a go here, huh? You guys ready? Yeah. This is Russ, thank you, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. Great. Oh boy. Yeah, my name is Aikon and I'm here to say this conference stage is in my DNA. I breathe it in and out, it's in my thumb prints. Yeah, I put the con in, con print. Yeah, coming out to jam, gonna be a grand slam. Yeah, you better have insurance for your ride on the grand villains. Oh my god, thank you.


Pag-tang-susubo, higian ng mose sa ang sigaw nagmasa, ang babun pag-asa, agung pag-asa yung muna si... Hello, my name is Maharlag Mai and I'm here to talk to you about disaster risk reduction and management. But before we talk about or even understand the meaning of disaster risk reduction and management, we have to first understand the meaning of a disaster. According to the United Nations, a disaster is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to the hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability, and capacity. Leading to one or more of the following, human, material, economic, and environmental losses and impacts. When we talk about disaster risk reduction, it really aims to reduce the damage caused by natural hazards like earthquakes, floods, droughts, and cyclones through an ethic of prevention. There is no such thing as a natural disaster, only natural hazards, which I will explain later on. Here in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world, when you talk about disaster risk reduction and management, we normally hear the words pillars and these pillars refer to the pillar of prevention and mitigation, preparedness pillar, the response pillar, the rehabilitation and recovery pillar. You might want to think of all of these pillars which are very important for our disaster risk reduction management efforts to be effective as that of preparations on prevention and mitigation long before the hazard strikes. When you talk about preparedness, you are really referring to what we do just before a hazard makes its impact. Like, for example, when a storm or a typhoon enters the Philippine area of responsibility, the government agencies group together, they meet up, discuss, and try to prepare for the impacts of the hazards. A couple of days or a couple of hours or a couple of minutes just before the typhoon makes impact. And then we talk about response. Response is another pillar which is very important in disaster risk reduction and management. That is during the hazard or when the hazard makes its impact, when it's there, while the typhoon is crossing, for example, the Philippine land territory. And then when we have a disaster already, there are effects which we need to address. We need to bounce back. We need to rehabilitate and we need to recover from the harsh impacts of any type of hazard. These pillars are very important because if we do not address each of them, then we will be failing in an important part of disaster risk reduction and management. But as you can see from what NDRRMC has done, they have adopted the concept of preparation first long before hazard strikes and recognize that it is very important because as the old saying goes, announce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Hence, if you look at that spiral going up, they put emphasis. Half of that circle refers to prevention and mitigation. And the other three parts, preparedness, recovery and rehabilitation response and rehabilitation and recovery are just comprising one fourth of the pipe or one fourth of that circle. Prevention and mitigation is very important and that must be done long before the hazard strikes. If you talk about climate change, we prepare now, not 30 years from now. We prepare today because the impacts of climate change are projected to be impacts of the future. Normally in the Philippines when we have disasters, many people are caught by surprise. They are caught by surprise because of the lack of preparation, the lack of planning, the lack of knowledge. If we have this thing going on forever, then we will never be successful in disaster mitigation and we will always have disasters in the Philippines with a lot of losses and maybe a lot of loss of lives. So we put emphasis on prevention and mitigation that's preparing long before the hazard strikes and anticipating the impacts. You might want to listen to this because this is very important, an important observation. Normally when there's a disaster and media tries to interview survivors, what they normally say is that this has not happened before. This is the first time you have experienced such a big flood. It has never happened before. This is the first time that landslides has happened in this area. Government officials, common people, the residents, the individuals in the community, if they survive a disaster, they always say that it's very, very common and that only tells us one thing, that they were not knowledgeable, they did not prepare, they got surprised and that means there was lack of preparation. There was lack of prevention and mitigation efforts, knowledge building, capacity building because if they did anticipate that future hazard, then they would not say that anymore. They would say, oh, we prepared for this. We expected this kind of event, a bigger event perhaps than what they have experienced. We came prepared but because of that, there was minimal loss of lives and there was a successful effort in risk reduction. That is what we want to achieve. We want to strengthen our prevention and mitigation efforts because that is the key to disaster risk reduction. Not to say that all the others are not important, they are equally important, but we put emphasis in prevention and mitigation because we not only save a lot of money but we also save a lot of people because of the preparations and a lot of resources, a lot of properties are saved due to this. The United Nations also emphasizes that disaster risk reduction is equal to hazard times exposure times vulnerability. So just by looking at this equation, we come to realize that risk is different from the hazard. So how is it different from the hazard? A hazard may occur in an unpopulated area in the hinterlands in a very remote area and not disrupt the area in terms of the manner by which we live. It will not disrupt the area because there are no people there and therefore because nobody is exposed and there are no vulnerable people, then the risk is low. However, if the hazard strikes in a populated area where there are a lot of buildings, a lot of people, a lot of high value property or a lot of property just doesn't have to be high and a lot of vulnerable people who don't have capacity may have, according to the United Nations, what we call as a high disaster risk index. So when we talk about risk, it is not just the hazard, it's not just the earthquake, it is not just the flood, it is not just the landslide but it's really an interaction between what the people do, where they get exposed to hazards and how vulnerable they are, what their capacity is, and that equates to what we call as disaster risk. So that means that we can do something about all of these adverse impacts of hazards by reducing, by planning well, by being smart, by being knowledgeable, by preparing we reduce the risk of these hazards that has been around for the longest time even before people came to inhabit the land or the world. When we talk about hazards, so now we're talking about hazards, we have to define because each and every word is very important. We cannot make a solution to a problem if we do not understand the problem. Now we have to start from the definition. We have to understand each and every word and take it to heart because if we don't understand, how can we prepare? So we have to go through this process and that process is understanding, education, knowledge building. If we are not educated about all of the hazards, we cannot be able to understand the correct means of addressing the harsh impacts of hazards. So let's start by reading the definition of hazard. It's a process or a phenomenon or human activities. So it can be manmade that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, social and economic disruption or environmental degradation. So that is the definition again of the United Nations, the source is prevention.web. When we talk about vulnerability in that equation, it refers to the conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community or systems to the impacts of hazards. So probably in Tagalog, I would give some examples such as for example, if you are not knowledgeable, you are vulnerable. If you do not have the means to transfer to another place to seek shelter because there was no shelter in that community, it was not well planned, you are vulnerable because you are in the path of a hazard.  Vulnerability involves a lot of factors, the physical, social, economic and environmental factors. Normally when there are many people who are poor, that increases the vulnerability of the area. But it does not mean that the rich cannot be affected by hazards. Everybody is equal when it comes to exposure when it comes to being impacted by any hazard, everybody is equal. The rich and the poor can get hit by floods, can be affected by earthquakes, can be buried by landslides. So vulnerability is an important concept in the equation of disaster risk. The third one is exposure which is the situation of people, infrastructure like housing, production capacities and other tangible human assets located in hazard-prone areas. We see here in that background the exposure of new Bataan. The white part, it's a little bit, there's a lot of transparency in the picture but you can make it out. It's a well-labeled, that's the new Bataan area. It's a relatively new area that has been built or that has been developed. And the people there in that municipality were evacuated to that part called Barangayanda. And you can see that the hazard was right there where they were evacuated in that red colored part of the image in Barangayanda. Had they stayed in new Bataan, there was less risk because there was less exposure from the hazards. The red parts are actually debris flows which is a very hazardous landslide phenomenon. So they were evacuated there. They were exposed as you can see in the map. They were vulnerable because they could not leave at the very last moment because the LGU requested them to go there, some forced to go there. And the hazard impacted that evacuation site. So maybe we can get an idea of what these terms really mean. Hazard is different from exposure, is different from the vulnerability, but when combined it defines what we call as disaster risk. Let me give some more examples. We have this program called Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards from 2012 to about mid-2016 which was quite successful in the sense that it was able to map out in detail the flood hazards, the landslide hazards and storm surge hazards of the country. That is quite expensive but because the University of the Philippines did it for a very cheap price, it turned out to be not that costly investment. UP, by the way, is a public service university. It's part of our mandate as the National University. Now here we see in that map, it's online, by the way, this NOAAUP.edu PH website. It's labeled flood hazard, and then there's exposure and there's a landslide hazard. So those red parts indicate high hazards from flood, from landslides and you can see a community there. Overlain with an orange and yellow type of hazard from landslides or that might be floods but I think that's a landslide hazard. So you have that hazard, you have that community that is exposed. We have to determine whether they are vulnerable or not if they have the capacity to flee from a flood hazard or a landslide hazard during the time of impact. Normally when it is time of the wet season when there are a lot of typhoons that come in and when we are able to define the hazard we define the exposure as well and from then on we can also define the vulnerability and see whether that certain community or part of the community has a high risk in terms of disasters or hazard impacts. So another part you see areas there which are not exposed the communities which are not exposed there are no building footprints there and what we really need to do in the Philippines is we have to define all of the building footprints. You see a time lapse of the mapping out of all the buildings at the start before and then after the efforts of UP came in we mapped out each and every building each and every road of 11 provinces but we were not able to complete all provinces but it needs to be done because that is the exposure as defined by the United Nations. We need to map it all out Kesun City is all mapped out you might want to help the efforts of the Open Street Mapping Group you can help out you can map out all of the buildings in your community, in your province to complete the picture of the exposed elements in the country that is an important element of the equation on disaster risk. For example this is part of Cavite sa Ilong General Mariano Alvarez I believe this is Karmona yes it is Karmona you can overlay the hazard because you know the exposed community you know the number of buildings you know the population you know the other parameters like for example how many people are pregnant how many are female how many are above the age of 60 or above the age of 80 when you cross or overlay all of these hazards against the exposed element and the knowledge of the vulnerability of the community you will be able to assess the disaster risk and assessment of the disaster risk allows you to prepare for the needs here the estimated population is 76,000 you know the distribution of those affected whether it's from a high hazard a low flood hazard or a moderate flood hazard the distribution of males females youth adults because you would need these counts to prepare for the food packs and medical supplies that you put in the area in advance before the hazard strikes it also allows you to look at other information that are necessary for the preparation stage when the the hazard is about to make its impact so you prepare for the needs in terms of the number of rice packs in terms of the clean water that's necessary drinking water clean water is different from drinking water family kits that are necessary to be prepared toilets the number of adults for pregnant women hygiene packs for women these are just examples of how a community prepares long in advance you need to know the demographics you need to know the exposure you need to know their capacity you need to know their vulnerability because if you don't prepare for them when the hazard strikes you will be caught by surprise you're caught unprepared and there will be a disaster there will be a large number of deaths not just from the impact of the hazards but secondary impacts because the community did not anticipate were not knowledgeable and did not know so knowledge is key knowledge is very important and we need to get this knowledge mainstreamed into the community efforts there needs to be a lot of education so these are just examples it can be a lot of things those examples must be planned across all sectors now that we have COVID we realize that a certain type of crisis affects all sectors of society it has affected everybody no exceptions even the agriculture sector the coastal, water, health, forestry diversity the environment, the energy sector education, tourism COVID-19 has affected tourism a lot infrastructure, settlement even mining and it's just a list of all of the sectors that needs to be planned when a hazard makes its impact it's not just the household you need to prepare for everything all of this in the list these in the list needs to have plans anticipatory plans for each and every type of hazard that may affect the community and mind you, the Philippines has almost all types of hazards except maybe for those related to snow, it's not maybe there's no snow here in the Philippines but snow-related hazards don't affect us practically all other hazards that you can think of and they're quite more common because we are in the typhoon belt and we are also in the Pacific ring of fire so it's very necessary that we have this equation and the pillars for disaster risk reduction in the world plan we have to address it through the years we have been trying to build our efforts and we're not yet there but so far we have done a lot early on after 2010 I think this was in 2013 or up to 2015 our rank in the world risk index was number three we were third to Vanuatu and Tongga in terms of risk between risk and hazard we were the third but because of the efforts of the Philippines in 2019 the world risk index shows that we are already at number nine from three to nine so considering all of those factors of hazards, exposure and vulnerability through planning of our communities and the efforts of everybody a whole of society approach mainly through planning we have reduced our ranking in the world risk index we started from three and now we are at number nine so congratulations to us hopefully we won't be in the top ten anymore if we keep on planning and preparing all of the cities and municipalities of the Philippines all 1634 cities and municipalities of our country now in terms of measuring the impact of Philippine disasters it can be measured in terms of either the number of events of the hazards that come in or that make its impact the number of deaths the number of affected persons or the losses to property all of these are important considerations and from 1901 to 2015 you can see that the storms and floods are the ones that create a lot of havoc in terms of natural disasters in 2017 by type you can see that storms, floods are the top most hazards that we need to prepare for landslides, earthquakes, wildfires drought and volcanic activity early on this year before the start of the crisis, the COVID-19 crisis we had tal erupting after several decades of rest and then it became restive, it exploded on January 12 roughly around probably one o'clock or 1.30 but really it also caught us by surprise there's technology and science that can actually tell us for volcanic activity when a volcano can erupt but for earthquakes, you cannot really predict it as to exact time and when it will happen when somebody says to you that earthquake, a big one will happen on Tuesday at 10.30 that's a lie, don't believe it because the current consensus of the scientific community is that nobody can predict an earthquake yet in terms of short-term forecasts but what this graph is showing to you is that storms and floods are the most terrible in terms of the hazards in terms of impacts that has affected us through the years that is also the figure that is being shown you can see also that I have crossed out the term natural disasters because if you talk about disasters happening that means that people were unprepared, so if people were unprepared, they were not smart they did not use the best of their abilities they did not communicate the knowledge about hazards they did not communicate prevention and mitigation preparedness response and recovery that means that it was man that was responsible for the disaster it was not man or humans that was responsible for the hazards but it was the human it's the human being the individuals in the community that were responsible for the disaster so when you talk about disaster there's always some kind of link to how we have prepared for the hazards impacts we are in the typhoon belt you can see all of the typhoons happening and entering the Philippine area of responsibility that's a lot practically covering with all of its tracks the entire Luzon and Visayans you can see that there are less typhoon tracks overlaying the big island of Mindanao we are also in the pacific ring of fire pacific ring of fire simply states that most of the earthquakes that have been recorded occur in zones or corridors or earthquake alleys you might want to think of it that way and around the pacific ring of fire is a corridor or zone of earthquakes and corresponding to that zone are a lot of volcanoes that have been erupting as well and because it surrounds the pacific ocean it's called as the pacific ring of fire not all earthquakes happen anywhere they happen in specific zones and in this region of the world around the pacific it's called as the pacific ring of fire and it includes Indonesia, the Philippines Japan, the Aleutian Islands Alaska, western United States western South America and it really goes around the pacific ocean that's why hence the name pacific ring of fire when we talk about floods I started discussing about typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes hurricanes is just the western equivalent of the name typhoons or bagyo in Tagalog when we talk about typhoons severe weather thunderstorms those are phenomena which are not actually the hazards they bring forth hazards trigger hazards called as floods landslides, storm surges and severe wind so practically what I'm saying is that because of typhoons and the monsoon rains the rains accumulate they have a downpour but the rain itself is not the hazard but when they form floods that is what kills people that is what damages property it's the same for landslides because of rains they trigger landslides you need 100 mm of rainfall in most cases to be able to trigger landslides in most cases remember it can also do storm surges or trigger storm surges because of the severe winds carried by typhoons severe winds can topple trees can rip off rooftops and get it blown away and when it lands it might hit a person and kill a person those are the hazards when we talk about hazards those are the ones that damage property and kill people so the phenomenon itself like a typhoon or monsoon rains aren't exactly the hazards they bring forth hazards and those related to meteorological hazards are floods, landslides, storm surges and severe winds we know about we are quite familiar this is undoy those are floods we have landslides this is a landslide that happened in Benguet which happened I think in 2017 landslides normally happen along steep slopes but they can also happen in moderate slopes or slopes that are unstable when man does artificial work in a certain area storm surges because of the high winds you might want to think of storm surges as waves that are blown by the wind it's probably similar an analogy would be if you have a coffee cup that is full of coffee if you blow it the coffee would spill over the rim of the cup and the analogy is that the typhoon has strong winds and that's similar to my blowing of the coffee in the cup so along beaches when the winds are very high are very strong 200 kilometers or 300 kilometers per hour they make the water of the sea go up and they may be as high as 5 sometimes even reaching 10 meters the effects would be variable along the coastline because if there's a cliff it won't enter land that much the slopes are quite gentle it may enter up to several kilometers in Takloban the storm surges entered inland 2-3 kilometers and devastated a lot of populated areas and killed a lot of people including those in evacuation centers we have since identified those places which are most vulnerable it's important that you know your area look at maps because maps identify the hazards in your community in your neighborhood so know the hazards not just the phenomenon but the hazards for each of these hazards that I talk to you about or floods or wind or storm surges and for landslides whether you are exposed to a certain type of hazard so know where to find these maps these maps are available online in NOAA.UP.EDU.PH there are also government efforts to do this to map out the floods the landslides, the severe wind you can go to the agency websites and look for them it's your duty to your family your duty to yourself to be able to look at these maps because if you are not aware that you are exposed when the time comes you will be caught by surprise and if there are many people who will be caught by surprise like you in your community if it's more than 10 that dies there at that community that has been impacted by a certain type of hazard is going to be called a disaster by the international community so know your hazards in your community because that is the best way to prepare against disasters strong winds, there are also maps we have examples of this that happened in the Philippines we have a lot of typhoons 20 that enter the Philippine area of responsibility so it's our responsibility to know the hazards because it's not the typhoon that we are really preparing for we are preparing for the hazards and you would like to find out whether you are exposed and whether you are vulnerable so we also have to anticipate we have to create maps that project scenarios bigger than the hazards of floods of landslides that we have experience because if we don't prepare for the bigger ones that we remember then we again will be caught by surprise so if we combine all of the hazards together we have what we call as multi-scenario multi-hazard these are landslide maps and these are flood maps so combining storm surge landslide scenarios these are different types of hazards associated with severe weather and when we put them together you have what we call as probabilistic multi-scenario based multi-hazard map map so you would find your community there you would find places that are not that vulnerable and not that exposed to hazards and that is really those are really the places which the community should develop because even if the hazard comes even if the hazard strikes there will be no losses because you plan your community away from the path of the hazards or where the hazards will impact now we go to earthquakes again nobody dies from the earthquake per se it's the hazards that kill people so the hazards associated with earthquakes are ground rupture collapse of structures fire, landslides ground subsidence, liquefaction and tsunamis so there is a variant what we call as sage which happens in pools or bodies of water like a lake of water we experienced that last 20 I think that was in 2017 no sorry it was in 2019 during that earthquake in Sambales it was felt in Metro Manila and a lot of pools shook and there were a lot of waves in the pools that's called as a sage it can happen in a lake like Laguna Lake now let's tackle this one by one ground rupture, collapse of structures fire, landslides, ground subsidence liquefaction and tsunamis you don't want to build on top of a fault in the Philippines our buffer zone is about 5 meters left and right of a fault so you must understand you must know where the fault is P-Volks has a website called fault finder where you can find all of the active faults P-Volks or building your house you don't want to build on top of a fault because if it ruptures it will get your building to probably look like that or your house to look like that and you really don't want that to happen faults are like this they are breaks in the rock wearing the blocks opposite sides of the fracture or the crack that you're seeing so that one is a fault you don't want your house to be on top of that because if that fault moves chances are your house will get ripped apart again people don't get shaken by earthquakes it's the collapse of structures if we follow the building code then there's a lot that we can prevent the building code makes our houses and our buildings withstand ground shaking so it's important to follow the building code when constructing a house or a building it has to be followed strictly because we're in an earthquake belt the threat of earthquakes is constant and we need to prepare and the threat or the hazard of earthquakes called this ground shaking can be addressed at least to a certain degree by our building code so follow the building code this is just the intensity of earthquakes there are maps when an earthquake happens if the ground material is the same the intensity of ground shaking is also the same within 10 kilometers and then after 10 kilometers the shaking of the ground rapidly dissipates or attenuates so know where your faults are know how far you are from the fault because that would determine the intensity of the ground shaking which is also dependent on the magnitude of the earthquake that will happen in your area and there are also ways to find out what magnitude a certain fault would do like for example they have predicted that the Marikina valley fault or the west valley fault can produce a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that magnitude 7.2 earthquake is quite large it's similar to the Bohol earthquake which is also of that same magnitude and when that happened those people who were living close to the earthquake source or what we call as epicenter stand on the ground because of the ground shaking and they had to kneel they had to kneel and sometimes their palms also on asphalt ground and because the ground was shaking terribly it was rubbing on their knees and palms and there was a lot of blood on their palms and knees according to the stories of the survivors so know where the fault is because that would determine how close you are and that would also determine the intensity of ground shaking which is dependent on the magnitude expected for a certain type of fault there are maps for the presence of the faults there are also maps for the intensity know where or what intensity there is so there are also maps past this they have prepared these hazard maps and of course landslides is another earthquake hazard there are also landslide maps brought about by earthquakes they trigger earthquakes when the ground shakes terribly a lot of ground is losing up and landslides may occur so know if you are in a landslide prone area there are maps for this your office your house you might want to determine if they are in that kind of place maps similar to this one in Bohol you can see that all of those yellow marks are the areas where landslides happen and they happen where it was predicted to happen all of those red marks which are what we call as landslide hazard maps so in Metro Manila along the west valley fault or the Marikina valley fault there are some pockets, some places which are prone to hazards fire is another type of hazard you might want to prepare for this close the gas valves you don't want the gas to leak out and have fire starting from that gas leak in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco many of the deaths or much of the damage was due to fire after the earthquake and we have to prepare for that when the ground shakes and the gravel and sand mixes with water it liquefies it looks like muddy liquid and if something is on top of that like a building after liquefaction the buildings would sway and of course because it's ground that has liquefied it will not go back so it will maintain its position and you would have lost the value of your property you cannot live there anymore so to address this liquefaction hazard one has to follow the building code check whether the construction was correct or not there are also maps whether your house or office or the school of your child is in a liquefiable area and ask whether that school was built to withstand liquefaction okay the tsunami problem or hazard is also very important to prepare for when the fault offshore along the Manila Trench moves it will take about a minute at about probably 30 minutes to reach Bataan so we have to prepare for this we have to know we have to have seismometers that would detect we have to have preparations before the Manila Trench moves we have to have a lot of studies that would tell us what the potential magnitude is because that would tell us the potential height of the tsunamis that would hit Roas Bolivar and how much inland inundation will happen we know that there are a lot of people that are exposed there and we have to prepare in advance all of the cities and municipalities along those lines we have a lot of faults in the Philippines and the potential for generating a lot of tsunamis the threat of tsunamis is a reality we have to protect the people along our coastlines again, there are maps that are available were made available on websites you can look for it you can ask whether your community is in an area that is the best way to define the hazards in a map to determine whether you are exposed and to determine also whether you are vulnerable if you have the capacity to move out how much time it takes to move out if you'll be able to do that if the tsunami happens in your area storm surges that is in the hydro meteorological hazards part but we also have maps for that now finally, there's another type of phenomenon called as volcanism we have a lot of volcanoes in the Philippines but it's not just the volcanic eruption that we need to consider in fact, we need to consider more the hazards brought about by that volcanic phenomenon or a volcano being or having volcanic activity or erupting and these hazards are as follows pyroplastic flows pyroplastic fall debris avalanches, lahar, slava, tsunami noxious gas like the hazards associated with severe weather and those associated with earthquakes all of these hazards must have corresponding maps and you have to look at all the volcanoes if you're near a volcano you look at the hazard map so that you can prepare maybe a brief description of what these pyroplastic flows are all about a picture would best describe what it is it's a hot density current that flows down the flanks of the volcano in French, they called as Mayon it erupted before it's black and white it's an old picture you can see the plume going up what comes up especially the heavy stuff must come down and when they roll down the flanks of the volcano that's a lot of hot materials it's a glowing cloud that travels very fast and it's very dangerous and when you get snuffed glowing cloud you will die for sure that is what happened in St. Pierre in Martinique it's the Paris of the West Indies it destroyed the entire town it used to be the harbor city of that area pouted as the Paris of the West Indies a favorite place where the French would frolic and would go to their holidays but it got destroyed totally, completely only one person survived that and he eventually turned out to become a part of the Barnum and Bailey Circus that is what happened that is what killed people in Pompeii as well when Visubius erupted in not sure 1709 or 1729 that's your assignment you tried to find out when that volcano erupted and how it killed the people in Pompeii there are movies that have been shown about how it killed people that picture that man or that cast is still there if you go to Pompeii now it's a very famous tourist place very famous tourist attraction it tells us of the the harsh impact of a pyroplastic flow so you might want to try to escape but you will never be able to escape if you are enveloped by the pyroplastic flow of course mayon volcano also erupted and you can see it erupting there shooting up high and there's that cloud that went lateral and went down those are pyroplastic flows cascading down the slopes of mayon volcano of course pyroplastic fall when it rains ash it would settle down on the ground it's very heavy it's about 1000 kilograms per cubic meter so if it settles on your roof tops you might want to sweep it off because when you sweep it off you reduce the risk of the roof falling down due to the weight of the pyroplastic fall which might kill you if the entire roof collapses on your head landslides that's also a main problem associated with volcanoes Mount St. Helens oops like this one in 1980 collapsed there was a huge sector of the volcano that collapsed and when it collapsed it reduced the pressure and triggered a violent eruption and these landslides called as debris avalanches can travel very far we've had some examples of debris avalanches in the Philippines part of the volcano collapsed and it traveled 10 to 11 kilometers that's very very far and if you think that you're safe 10 or 11 kilometers away from the foot of the volcano you might be wrong because debris avalanches can travel several kilometers from its source when they happen so look at the maps for landslides associated with volcanoes that are exposed lahars everybody is familiar with the lahar what a lahar is we've had several of those happening after the pinatubo erupted several years after we've had lahars during reming or typhoon durian that killed almost 2,000 people along the foot slopes of Mayan volcano but also in Nevada del Ruiz so it can really be devastating if you don't prepare for these hazards associated with volcanoes lava's are hot molten rock these are the glowing stuff that you see being released it was released during the Tal eruption at night there was a lot of lava that was spewed by the mouth of the volcano and that is called as a hot molten rock that has reached the surface so these are other pictures of lavas that you can see being thrown out of the crater map of course, tsunamis earthquakes are not the only sources of tsunamis when a volcano collapses in water such as what happened in Anak Krakataw when Krakataw volcano erupted in the late 1800s it generated big ocean waves or giant ocean waves but this time around it was not triggered by an earthquake it was triggered by a volcanic eruption a collapse that was heard a long way up to the Philippines the impact was quite large those are probably sound waves that you're seeing and it killed a lot of people but at that time the late 1800s 60,000 people died along the coasts of Sumatra and Chauba of course gases can be released by volcanoes gases such as CO2 they're heavier than air they're denser than the air in the atmosphere and they're invisible in 1986 in Lake Nayos in Cameroon people as it flowed along the slopes of the volcano and creeped into the communities and killed a lot of people in those communities including livestock so that's Noxious Gas that's another hazard associated with volcanoes so we discussed all of the different types of hazards associated with severe weather with earthquakes and volcanism again it's not really the phenomenon that is the hazard it's not the phenomenon that we really have to prepare for we have to prepare for the hazards that are spawned or triggered by all of these natural phenomena that's a lot of work we need to identify where they would impact that can be seen from maps if our house or our office or the school where our children go to are exposed to those hazards we have to determine our capability to flee from the hazard when it happens so that we can do something about it long before it happens and not just a couple of seconds when it happens our response our attention to our ability to address disasters is through response which is incorrect it's too late we don't act until it's too late until it's about 30 seconds or 1 minute before the hazard makes its impact we have to prepare long in advance because it involves a lot of work it involves identification of all of the hazards from all of these different triggering phenomena it involves identification of the exposed areas your house, the buildings and it has to be identified and planned accordingly you don't want to build in areas that are always stricken by hazards you'll save a lot plan well and if you avoid those places and of course there's also such a thing as increasing the capacity of people knowledge is increasing the capacity of people to address the impacts of hazards so in a warning system it's not really just the warning that is given to us by our government agencies by the NDRRMC because if we just listen to those warnings it's going to be too late a people centered early warning system involves risk knowledge which is systematically collecting data and undertaking risk assessments which is what I talked about it's about developing hazards the monitoring ability the use of technology and that is the responsibility of the government agency so it's only a part of that early warning system which is people centered it's only one forth that's the responsibility it's the duty of government to be able to give you good warning using the best available technologies and the best available science once we have determined what the hazards are what places would be affected it's important that we plan and disseminate through communication through media, through planning through information education campaigns the risk and the early warnings and we need to understand it not just minutes before the hazard strikes but long before so it must be in our school curriculum or curriculum K-9 about climate change about the different types of hazards it needs to be embedded because we cannot just learn all of these things minutes before its impact we need to get this ingrained in our minds part of our muscle memory it has to be there it has to be part of our culture we have to have that belief system that is appropriate to address all of this knowledge about hazards all of this knowledge about how to address these hazards which is actually risk reduction and then that leads us to the concept of response capability once we have that knowledge once we have that technical know-how that ability to predict when through forecasts a certain hazard will impact we can communicate that along with that risk knowledge to the people each and every individual down to family level that is what we call as response capability when all of these is complete risk knowledge monitoring and warning, dissemination and response capability are in place we have what we call a people centered early warning system which involves government which involves you, me, the community and everybody to be able to make it work there needs to be participation of everybody after all everybody is under threat from all of these hazards in our country and we need to make this working put in place because if we do not we will just wait for the next disaster to strike and count dead bodies and count losses in terms of property damage we have to do it now we don't do it days or minutes before the hazard makes its impact and turn into what we call as a disaster thank you