ИСТИНА

The safe exploitation of Mountain regions depends on their influence to natural mass movement hazards, such as snow avalanches, debris flows and rockfalls. We are going to discuss this problem in terms of snow avalanche hazard assessment as an essential part of engineering in the world and Russia. The rapidly increasing snow avalanche hazard in Russia is a result of the accelerated growth of the mountain recreation as well as mining industry. Unfortunately, great avalanche accidents worked as a trigger for the appearance of snow avalanche research groups as well as the development of avalanche hazard assessment approaches. For example great avalanche events: in Kirovsk (Russia, 1935); in Alps (1951, 1954, 1999); etc. Each of this avalanche event influenced on the views of the avalanche assessment, forecast, mapping and modeling, etc. This paper describes the various approaches for the avalanche hazard assessment that appeared due to big avalanche disasters. Unfortunately there is no useful technical avalanche guideline in Russia. However it gives more freedom to Russian developers but causes lots of uncertainties concerning the safety of people. Certainly there is no sense in waiting of the next awful avalanche event. We are going to present a new approach of the avalanche hazard zoning in Russia based on the Alpine concepts as well as traditional Russian methods. Avalanche zoning as a process for identifying areas endangered by snow avalanches of different intensity on a map and regulating the types of land uses allowed is widely used in the World but is not yet used to prevent construction in endangered areas in Russia. We hope that after validation our approach could be implemented into Russian snow engineering practice.