Water transport for managing disasters: insights from the remote and touristic Patagonian lakes, Argentina

SALGADO, PABLO AGUSTÍN; VILLAROSA, GUSTAVO; BEIGT, DÉBORA; OUTES, VALERIA; WILSON, THOMAS

Heraklion

Congreso; Cities on volcanoes 11; 2022

IAVCEI

The remote North Patagonian region is a sparsely populated territory and a world-famous tourist destination located on the leeward side of the Andes Mountains. Recent disasters triggered by various types of geoenvironmental events (including volcanic eruptions, mass-wasting processes, and extreme weather events) heavily disrupted ground transport networks in a region with already limited territorial accessibilities. All these catastrophes prompted the need to evacuate or assist a number of secluded visitors, locals, and livestock extemporaneously on board coastguard ships and tourist passenger-ships from the shores of the many glacial lakes that make up part of the regional attraction. Despite the recurrence of these types of events, water evacuations continue to be spontaneous, improvised, and hazardous procedures in the region. This contribution reconstructs and assesses a number of recent local-scale cases of lake evacuations or assistance from Patagonian urban centers, rural areas, and tourist sites. For each case study, we systematically elaborated on the prime components of an evacuation process, which enabled us to recognize key achievements, failures, and conditioning factors, most of them inherent to the studied region. The most relevant complexities identified for evacuating, assisting, and sheltering at-risk coastal populations referred to limited ground-based accessibilities, availability, and vulnerability of water transport resources, and a wide range of particular demographic features. We suggested fundamental and replicable recommendations for developing water evacuation plans and identified forthcoming problems to solve in order to improve the management of emergencies through this alternative means of transport.