It is widely assumed that humanity should be able to learn from calamities (e.g., emergencies, disasters, catastrophes) and that the affected individuals, groups, and enterprises, as well as the concerned (disaster-) management organizations and institutions for prevention and mitigation, will be able to be better prepared or more efficient next time. Furthermore, it is often assumed that the results of these learning processes are preserved as "knowledge" in the collective memory of a society, and that patterns of practices were adopted on this base. Within history, there is more evidence for the opposite: Analyzing past calamities reveals that there is hardly any learning and, if so, that it rarely lasts more than one or two generations. This book explores whether learning in the context of calamities happens at all, and if learning takes place, under which conditions it can be achieved and what would be required to ensure that learned cognitive and practical knowledge will endure on a societal level. The contributions of this book include various fields of scientific research: history, sociology, geography, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, development studies and political studies, as well as disaster research and disaster risk reduction research.

In December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions of Sri Lanka. Six months later, Michele Ruth Gamburd returned to the village where she had been conducting research for many years and began collecting residents' stories of the disaster and its aftermath: the chaos and loss of the flood itself; the sense of community and leveling of social distinctions as people worked together to recover and regroup; and the local and national politics of foreign aid as the country began to rebuild. In The Golden Wave, Gamburd describes how the catastrophe changed social identities, economic dynamics, and political structures.

Displacement has traditionally been conceptualized as a phenomenon that results from conflict or other disruptions in developing or unstable countries. Hurricane Katrina shattered this notion and highlighted the various dilemmas of population displacement in the United States. The dilemmas stem from that of inconsistent terminology and definitions; lack of efforts to quantify displacement risk potential and that factor displacement vulnerability into community plans; lack of understanding of differential needs of "displacees" especially during long-term recovery periods; and policy and institutional responses (or lack thereof) especially as it relates to post-disaster sheltering and housing. Incorporating relevant examples, cases, and policies Esnard and Sapat look at the experience of other countries and how the international community has dealt with hundreds of thousands of individuals who have been forced to leave their homes. Displaced by Disaster addresses such issues from a planning and policy perspective informed by scholarship in disciplines such as emergency management; political science; sociology and anthropology. It is ideal for students and practitioners working in the areas of disaster management, planning, public administration and policy, housing, and the many disciplines connected to disaster issues.

Japan has been one of the most important international sponsors of human security, yet the concept has hitherto not been considered relevant to the Japanese domestic context. This book applies the human security approach to the specific case of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that struck Japan on 11 March 2011, which has come to be known as Japan's 'triple disaster'. This left more than 15,000 people dead and was the most expensive natural disaster in recorded history. The book identifies the many different forms of human insecurity that were produced or exacerbated within Japan by the triple disaster. Each chapter adds to the contemporary literature by identifying the vulnerability of Japanese social groups and communities, and examining how they collectively seek to prevent, respond to and recover from disaster. Emphasis is given to analysis of the more encouraging signs of human empowerment that have occurred. Contributors draw on a wide range of perspectives, from disciplines such as: disaster studies, environmental studies, gender studies, international relations, Japanese studies, philosophy and sociology. In considering this Japanese case study in detail, the book demonstrates to researchers, postgraduate students, policy makers and practitioners how the concept of human security can be practically applied at a policy level to the domestic affairs of developed countries, countering the tendency to regard human security as exclusively for developing states.

Displacement has traditionally been conceptualized as a phenomenon that results from conflict or other disruptions in developing or unstable countries. Hurricane Katrina shattered this notion and highlighted the various dilemmas of population displacement in the United States. The dilemmas stem from that of inconsistent terminology and definitions; lack of efforts to quantify displacement risk potential and that factor displacement vulnerability into community plans; lack of understanding of differential needs of "displacees" especially during long-term recovery periods; and policy and institutional responses (or lack thereof) especially as it relates to post-disaster sheltering and housing. Incorporating relevant examples, cases, and policies Esnard and Sapat look at the experience of other countries and how the international community has dealt with hundreds of thousands of individuals who have been forced to leave their homes. Displaced by Disaster addresses such issues from a planning and policy perspective informed by scholarship in disciplines such as emergency management; political science; sociology and anthropology. It is ideal for students and practitioners working in the areas of disaster management, planning, public administration and policy, housing, and the many disciplines connected to disaster issues.

When the Nuclear Safety Commission in Japan reviewed safety-design guidelines for nuclear plants in 1990, the regulatory agency explicitly ruled out the need to consider prolonged AC power loss. In other words, nothing like the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was possible-no tsunami of 45 feet could swamp a nuclear power station and knock out its emergency systems. No blackout could last for days. No triple meltdown could occur. Nothing like this could ever happen. Until it did-over the course of a week in March 2011. In this volume and in gripping detail, the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, a civilian-led group, presents a thorough and powerful account of what happened within hours and days after this nuclear disaster, the second worst in history. It documents the findings of a working group of more than thirty people, including natural scientists and engineers, social scientists and researchers, business people, lawyers, and journalists, who researched this crisis involving multiple simultaneous dangers. They conducted over 300 investigative interviews to collect testimony from relevant individuals. The responsibility of this committee was to act as an external ombudsman, summarizing its conclusions in the form of an original report, published in Japanese in February 2012. This has now been substantially rewritten and revised for this English-language edition. The work reveals the truth behind the tragic saga of the multiple catastrophic accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.It serves as a valuable and essential historical reference, which will help to inform and guide future nuclear safety and policy in both Japan and internationally.

Femke, her mother Trijn and her grandfather have very different ideas about how to run their family farm. Tensions between mother and daughter are growing; Femke wants to switch to sustainable growing principles, whilst her mother considers this an attack on tradition. To make matters worse, their home province of Groningen is experiencing a series of earthquakes caused by drilling for gas at a site close to their farm. While the cracks and splinters in their farmhouse increase, the authorities and the state-owned gas company refuse to offer the local farming community any help. In Shocked Earth, Saskia Goldschmidt investigates what it means to have your identity intensely entwined with your place of birth and your principles at odds with your closest kin. And how to keep standing when the world as you know it is slowly falling apart.

This book analyzes climate change associated effects in the mountainous and coastal environments of Vietnam. The scope of the book allows international comparisons to be made between these two affected areas and other similarly affected locations under constant environmental pressure. Frequent and intense climate change hazards are described, along with a wider context of integrated interpretations, socioeconomic implications and policy responses. The book reports on original research combining methodologies from the natural sciences with approaches in human sciences, providing an interdisciplinary human ecological context to analyze similar situations worldwide. The book is structured in four parts. The first part offers background information, and details the human ecological framework. The geography of the analyzed regions is discussed to reflect the environmental and socioeconomic context of Vietnam's coasts and mountains. The second part addresses the coast of Central Vietnam. The effects of tropical storms, floods, rising sea levels and coastal erosion in Ky Anh are studied to highlight the impacts on the local population and its development perspectives. The third part focuses on the uplands of Northern Vietnam. The effects of cyclones, heavy rains, floods, flash floods, and landslides in the Van Chan Mountains are studied to compare the biophysical and socioeconomic impacts. Part four makes policy recommendations in building resilient landscapes and green cities, and discusses the potential implications of findings for practice in Vietnam. The book addresses a wide array of researchers, geography and economics students, consultants and decision makers interested in the actual status and the likely developments on the physical, socioeconomic and mitigation and adaptation attitudes and policies of climate change associated effects.

This book deals with both actual and potential terrorist attacks on the United States as well as natural disaster preparedness and management in the current era of global climate change. The topics of preparedness, critical infrastructure investments, and risk assessment are covered in detail. The author takes the reader beyond counterterrorism statistics, better first responder equipment, and a fixation on FEMA grant proposals to a holistic analysis and implementation of mitigation, response, and recovery efforts. The recent Oklahoma tornadoes and West Texas storage tank explosion show the unpredictability of disaster patterns, and the Boston Marathon bombings expose the difficulty in predicting and preventing attacks. Egli makes a compelling case for a culture of resilience by asserting a new focus on interagency collaboration, public-private partnerships, and collective action. Building upon the lessons of the 9/11 attacks, hurricane Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the basic findings are supported by a creative mix of case studies, which include superstorm Sandy, cascading power outages, GPS and other system vulnerabilities, and Japan's Fukushima disaster with its sobering aftermath. This book will help a new generation of leaders understand the need for smart resilience.

In pursuit of lifestyle change, affordable property, and proximity to nature, people from all walks of life are moving to the wildland-urban interface. Tragic wildfires and a predicted increase in high fire danger weather with climate change have triggered concern for the safety of such amenity-led migrants in wildfire-prone landscapes. This book examines wildfire awareness and preparedness amongst women, men, households, communities and agencies at the interface between city and beyond. It does so through an examination of two regions where wildfires are common and disastrous, and where how to deal with them is a major political issue: southeast Australia and the west coast United States. It follows women's and men's stories of surviving, fighting, evacuating, living and working with wildfire to reveal the intimate inner workings of wildfire response - and especially the culturally and historically distinct gender relations that underpin wildfire resilience. Wildfire is revealed as much more than a "natural" hazard - it is far from gender-neutral. Rather, wildfire is an important means through which traditional gender roles and power relations are maintained despite changing social circumstances. Women's and men's subjectivities are shaped by varying senses of inclusion, exclusion, engagement and disengagement with wildfire management. This leads to the reproduction of gender identities with clear ramifications for if, how and to what extent women and men prepare for wildfire.

This book, first published in 1984, deals authoritatively with the nature and management of slope failures and sediment movement and their impact on the hazardous landscape of Los Angeles county. Bringing together for the first time a wide range of information derived from field observations, interviews, manuscript records, local agency reports and published sources, the book presents an analysis of the ways in which a rapidly developing metropolis has come to terms with complex geomorphological hazards. In particular, the events accompanying the major storms of 1914, 1934, 1969 and 1978 are reconstructed in detail.

Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe - a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people's lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mapping Vulnerability is essential reading for academics, students, policymakers and practitioners in disaster studies, geography, development studies, economics, environmental studies and sociology.

Humanitarian crises - resulting from conflict, natural disaster or political collapse - are usually perceived as a complete break from normality, spurring special emergency policies and interventions. In reality, there are many continuities and discontinuities between crisis and normality. What does this mean for our understanding of politics, aid, and local institutions during crises? This book examines this question from a sociological perspective. This book provides a qualitative inquiry into the social and political dynamics of local institutional response, international policy and aid interventions in crises caused by conflict or natural disaster. Emphasising the importance of everyday practices, this book qualitatively unravels the social and political working of policies, aid programmes and local institutions. The first part of the book deals with the social life of politics in crisis. Some of the questions raised are: What is the meaning of human security in practice? How do governments and other actors use crises to securitize - and hence depoliticize - their strategies? The second part of the book deals with the question how local institutions fare under and transform in response to crises. Conflicts and disasters are breakpoints of social order, with a considerable degree of chaos and disruption, but they are also marked by processes of continuity and re-ordering, or the creation of new institutions and linkages. This part of the book focuses on institutions varying from inter-ethnic marriage patterns in Sri Lanka to situation of institutional multiplicity in Angola. The final part of the book concerns the social and political realities of different domains of interventions in crisis, including humanitarian aid, peace-building, disaster risk reduction and safety nets to address chronic food crises. This book gives students and researchers in humanitarian studies, disaster studies, conflict and peace studies as well as humanitarian and military practitioners an invaluable wealth of case studies and unique political science analysis of the humanitarian studies field.

Despite preemptive preparations, disasters can and do occur. Whether natural disasters, catastrophic accidents, or terrorist attacks, the risk cannot be completely eliminated. A carefully prepared response is your best defense. Handbook of Emergency Response: A Human Factors and Systems Engineering Approach presents practical advice and guidelines on how to plan the coordinated execution of emergency response. A useful tool to mitigate logistical problems that often follow disasters or extreme events, the core of this guide is the role of human factors in emergency response project management. The handbook provides a systematic structure for communication, cooperation, and coordination. It highlights what must be done and when, and how to identify the resources required for each effort. The book tackles cutting-edge research in topics such as evacuation planning, chemical agent sensor placement, and riverflow prediction. It offers strategies for establishing an effective training program for first responders and insightful advice in managing waste associated with disasters. Managing a project in the wake of a tragedy is complicated and involves various emotional, sentimental, reactive, and chaotic responses. This is the time that a structured communication model is most needed. Having a guiding model for emergency response can help put things in proper focus. This book provides that model. It guides you through planning for and responding to various emergencies and in overcoming the challenges in these tasks.

Humanitarian crises - resulting from conflict, natural disaster or political collapse - are usually perceived as a complete break from normality, spurring special emergency policies and interventions. In reality, there are many continuities and discontinuities between crisis and normality. What does this mean for our understanding of politics, aid, and local institutions during crises? This book examines this question from a sociological perspective. This book provides a qualitative inquiry into the social and political dynamics of local institutional response, international policy and aid interventions in crises caused by conflict or natural disaster. Emphasising the importance of everyday practices, this book qualitatively unravels the social and political working of policies, aid programmes and local institutions. The first part of the book deals with the social life of politics in crisis. Some of the questions raised are: What is the meaning of human security in practice? How do governments and other actors use crises to securitize - and hence depoliticize - their strategies? The second part of the book deals with the question how local institutions fare under and transform in response to crises. Conflicts and disasters are breakpoints of social order, with a considerable degree of chaos and disruption, but they are also marked by processes of continuity and re-ordering, or the creation of new institutions and linkages. This part of the book focuses on institutions varying from inter-ethnic marriage patterns in Sri Lanka to situation of institutional multiplicity in Angola. The final part of the book concerns the social and political realities of different domains of interventions in crisis, including humanitarian aid, peace-building, disaster risk reduction and safety nets to address chronic food crises. This book gives students and researchers in humanitarian studies, disaster studies, conflict and peace studies as well as humanitarian and military practitioners an invaluable wealth of case studies and unique political science analysis of the humanitarian studies field.

The term 'natural disaster' is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase 'natural disaster' suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth.

At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed. It also focuses on what makes people vulnerable. Often this means analyzing the links between poverty and vulnerability. But it is also important to take account of different social groups that suffer more in extreme events, including women, children, the frail and elderly, ethnic minorities, illegal immigrants, refugees and people with disabilities.

Vulnerability has also been increased by global environmental change and economic globalization - it is an irony of the 'risk society' that efforts to provide 'security' often create new risks. Fifty years of deforestation in Honduras and Nicaragua opened up the land for the export of beef, coffee, bananas, and cotton. It enriched the few, but endangered the many when hurricane Mitch struck these areas in 1998. Rainfall sent denuded hillsides sliding down on villages and towns.

This new edition of At Risk confronts a further ten years of ever more expensive and deadly disasters since it was first published and discusses disaster not as an aberration, but as a signal failure of mainstream 'development'. Two analytical models are provided as tools for understanding vulnerability. One links remote and distant 'root causes' to 'unsafe conditions' in a 'progression of vulnerability'. The other uses the concepts of 'access' and 'livelihood' to understand why some households are more vulnerable than others.

The book then concludes with strategies to create a safer world..

In 2011, there were fourteen natural calamities that each destroyed over a billion dollars worth of property in the United States alone. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and major earthquakes struck in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and Afghanistan. In the first half of 2013, the awful drumbeat continued a monster supertornado struck Moore, Oklahoma; a powerful earthquake shook Sichuan, China; a cyclone ravaged Queensland, Australia; massive floods inundated Jakarta, Indonesia; and the largest wildfire ever engulfed a large part of Colorado.

Despite these events, we still behave as if natural disasters are outliers. Why else would we continue to build new communities near active volcanoes, on tectonically active faults, on flood plains, and in areas routinely lashed by vicious storms?

A famous historian once observed that civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice. In the pages of this unique book, leading geologist Susan W. Kieffer provides a primer on most types of natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes, cyclones, and tornadoes. By taking us behind the scenes of the underlying geology that causes them, she shows why natural disasters are more common than we realize, and that their impact on us will increase as our growing population crowds us into ever more vulnerable areas.

Kieffer describes how natural disasters result from changes in state in a geologic system, much as when water turns to steam. By understanding what causes these changes of state, we can begin to understand the dynamics of natural disasters.

In the book s concluding chapter, Kieffer outlines how we might better prepare for, and in some cases prevent, future disasters. She also calls for the creation of an organization, something akin to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but focused on pending natural disasters."

Natural disasters in recent years have brought the study of disaster resiliency to the forefront. The importance of community preparedness and sustainability has been underscored by such calamities as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Natural disasters will inevitably continue to occur, but by understanding the concept of resiliency as well as the factors that lead to it, communities can minimize their vulnerabilities and increase their resilience.

In this volume, editors Naim Kapucu, Christopher V. Hawkins, and Fernando I. Rivera gather an impressive array of scholars to provide a much needed re-think to the topic disaster resiliency. Previous research on the subject has mainly focused on case studies, but this book offers a more systematic and empirical assessment of resiliency, while at the same time delving into new areas of exploration, including vulnerabilities of mobile home parks, the importance of asset mapping, and the differences between rural and urban locations. Employing a variety of statistical techniques and applying these to disasters in the United States and worldwide, this book examines resiliency through comparative methods which examine public management and policy, community planning and development, and, on the individual level, the ways in which culture, socio-economic status, and social networks contribute to resiliency. The analyses drawn will lead to the development of strategies for community preparation, response, and recovery to natural disasters.

Combining the concept of resiliency, the factors that most account for the resiliency of communities, and the various policies and government operations that can be developed to increase the sustainability of communities in face of disasters, the editors and contributors have assembled an essential resource to scholars in emergency planning, management, and policy, as well as upper-level students studying disaster management and policy.

On March 11,2011, Japan experienced the largest earthquake in its history, causing massive property damage. This book summarizes and critically analyzes the natural events and human shortcomings responsible for the failure of the Fukushima reactors during the first year following the accident, and governmental and civilian responses to the emergency. It covers the plant's safety history, the tsunami and earthquake, and the implications of the events on the nuclear reactor industry.

This book explores practices and approaches on pre-disaster prevention and post-disaster reconstruction for vulnerable countries and areas enhancing earthquake disaster resilience. Destructive earthquakes have frequently occurred in urban or rural areas around the world, causing severe damage on human societies. Pre-earthquake prevention and post-earthquake reconstruction effect the disaster resilience building and long-term development of the affected communities and areas. In recent years, researchers from around the world have made a lot of efforts to study on the theme 'earthquake disaster prevention and reconstruction'. The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the literature of earthquake disaster research from scientific, social and institutional aspects. These interdisciplinary studies mainly focus on human and policy dimensions of earthquake disaster, such as earthquake risk mitigation, social-physical resilience building, resilience capability assessment, healthcare surge capacity, house reconstruction, the roles of schools, households, civil societies and public participation in earthquake disaster prevention and reconstruction. The authors come from several counties, including China, Bangladesh, Iran, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Indonesia, covering the cases from those countries prone to earthquakes. These nine distinctive chapters have been elaborately selected and integrated from the international, ranked, peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Hazards.

Through its exploration of the spatial dimension of risk, this book offers a brand new approach to theorizing risk, and significant improvements in how to manage, tolerate and take risks. A broad range of risks are examined, including natural hazards, climate change, political violence, and state failure. Case studies range from the Congo to Central Asia, from tsunami in Japan and civil war affected areas in Sri Lanka to avalanche hazards in Austria. In each of these cases, the authors examine the importance and role of space in the causes and differentiation of risk, in how we can conceptualize risk from a spatial perspective and in the relevance of space and locality for risk governance. This new approach endorsed by Ragnar L fstedt and Ortwin Renn, two of the world's leading and most prolific risk analysts is essential reading for those charged with studying, anticipating and managing risks.

Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not perform as intended. If we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to predict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking provides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase the resiliency of the world in which we live.

In Designing to Avoid Disaster, the author discusses the context and cultural assumptions that have led to a number of disasters worldwide, describing the nature of fracture-critical design and why it has become so prevalent. He traces the impact of fracture-critical thinking on everything from our economy and politics to our educational and infrastructure systems to the communities, buildings, and products we inhabit and use everyday. And he shows how the natural environment and human population itself have both begun to move on a path toward a fracture-critical collapse that we need to do everything possible to avoid. We designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that Fisher provides.

Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not perform as intended. If we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to predict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking provides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase the resiliency of the world in which we live.

In Designing to Avoid Disaster, the author discusses the context and cultural assumptions that have led to a number of disasters worldwide, describing the nature of fracture-critical design and why it has become so prevalent. He traces the impact of fracture-critical thinking on everything from our economy and politics to our educational and infrastructure systems to the communities, buildings, and products we inhabit and use everyday. And he shows how the natural environment and human population itself have both begun to move on a path toward a fracture-critical collapse that we need to do everything possible to avoid. We designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that Fisher provides.

-Accessible introduction to the full spectrum of diseases and disasters for students of politics, human security studies and development studies -Case studies include Covid-19, Haiti Earthquake 2010, Hurricane Maria, Typhoon Haiyan, Second Congo War; Yemen Civil War; Tajikistan Civil War, AIDS in Africa, Malaria, SARS, and Ebola -Timely new textbook to address issues arising from the Covid-19 global pandemic