Community Response and Resilience to the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

As the largest European seismic event in the historical record, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake served as the catalyst for subsequent changes in how modern societies mitigate and manage potentially catastrophic events. This catalytic collaborative project, involving researchers based in the US and Portugal, will explore the response of communities in 18th century Portugal to this event, drawing upon contemporary reports from hundreds of parishes in Portugal which describe how members of the clergy, military and government responded to the disaster. Characteristics of the communities under study are available from additional contemporary sources which, along with other sources for this work, are held in the Portuguese National Archives. Additional research will be undertaken to characterize the development and deployment of post-disaster assessment tools (such as surveys) used by the Portuguese government following the event. Combined qualitative and quantitative methods (such as content analysis and statistical data modeling) will be used to provide a context for the data under study and to enable testing of research hypotheses. This research is expected to advance understanding of human response to disaster by considering community response activities in light of current understanding of the effects of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It will contribute to research on how disaster response decision making may be shaped by characteristics both of affected communities and of the disaster itself. It will thus provide an historically grounded critique of current theories of community resilience, and is expected to identify opportunities and limitations to improving the response of current communities to disaster. Finally, it is expected to contribute tools and techniques for undertaking analysis of disaster-related data that are embedded deep in the historical record.