Half a dozen years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, but the international community no longer seems interested. This immersive and engrossing book, based on five years of research and scores of interviews translated from Haitian Kreyol, gives voice to the continuing struggle of Haitian people to reconstruct their nation from the devastation of the earthquake, and from many decades of political and economic disaster. The earthquake killed more than 200,000, rendered more than a million and a half homeless, and wiped out what little infrastructure existed in the country. But prior to the quake, half the country was illiterate and two-thirds of Haitians lived in poverty. This book makes clear the long genesis of the ongoing crisis and illuminates the depths of the continuing problems, and does so through some of the most marginal and least-heard people in the world. An interview with a restavek--a child sent by poor parents to work as an unpaid servant in a wealthier household--is an example. A recent study determined a figure of 173,000 restaveks--about 8 percent of the population of children.

Food aid has played a key role in responding to the extreme poverty and disasters afflicting millions of people in the developing world. It is at the centre of much political discussion, both nationally and internationally, and there have been notable successes, yet there is doubt and criticism about the appropriateness of food aid and confusion about the deep-rooted problems which perpetuate these calamities. Is food aid doing more harm than good? Can food aid help, not hinder, long-term development and self-reliance? Would a cheque not be better than food?;This book is designed to give a clear insight into the key issues, presenting a balanced assessment of the uses and misuses of food aid and relating these to the complex realities of the international economy. It is aimed at first-degree courses in development economics, scholars and policy-makers in the field and the general reader concerned with these issues.

Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In "The Next Catastrophe," he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness.

Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us.

"The Next Catastrophe" is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready? In a new preface to the paperback edition, Perrow examines the recent (and ongoing) catastrophes of the financial crisis, the BP oil spill, and global warming.

"Disasters freely roam and reign in India. This is no longer the country where its people can claim a safe living. What is the aetiology that brews disasters? Which are the processes that perpetuate this rude stream of life? Who are at the sharp edge of disasters? What explains the spatial manifestation of disasters? Addressing these and similar other issues, the studies in this book demyth the popular belief that disasters are acts of nature. Mapping the space of disasters the book lays its foundation on a bedrock of facts that includes over 50 maps and almost 100 tables. Responding to a felt need to reach out to the victims of disasters in India, the studies take on the city and its dweller, the industry and its worker, the rail network and its passengers. The book does not claim that every Indian is a victim of disaster but it does reiterate the strong potential and eventuality of their becoming one. The grim reality exposed is that we the people of India have converted India into a land ensnared with disasters. CONTENTS 1. A Grim Reality 2. Delhi: A Disaster Prone National Capital 3. Greater Mumbai: Teaming with Disasters 4. Kolkata: A City on the Brink 5. Bhuj Earthquake: Rural-Urban Differentiation 6. Problematic City Space: Relocation of Hazardous Industries 7. Indian Railways: On Wheels of Death"

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Almost 68.5 million refugees in the world today live in a protection gap, the chasm between protections stipulated in the Geneva Convention and the abrogation of those responsibilities by states and aid agencies. With dwindling humanitarian aid, how do refugee communities solve collective dilemmas, like raising funds for funeral services, or securing other critical goods and services? In Networked Refugees, Nadya Hajj finds that Palestinian refugees utilize Information Communication Technology platforms to motivate reciprocity-a cooperative action marked by the mutual exchange of favors and services-and informally seek aid and connection with their transnational diaspora community. Using surveys conducted with Palestinians throughout the diaspora, interviews with those inside the Nahr al Bared Refugee camp in Lebanon, and data pulled from online community spaces, these findings push back against the cynical idea that online organizing is fruitless, emphasizing instead the productivity of these digital networks.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, inundating plantations and displacing more than half a million people, the flood provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event took on public meanings. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees in "concentration camps" prompted pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to warn of the return of slavery to Dixie. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood "the most colossal blunder in civilized history." Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures--from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright--shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 enables us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.

A compelling and definitive account of why we need to radically rethink our approach to dealing with catastrophic events Catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tohoku "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit the eastern seaboard of Japan in 2012 are seen as surprises that have a low probability of occurring but have a debilitating impact when they do. In this eye-opening journey through modern and ancient risk management practices, Jon Coaffee explains why we need to find a new way to navigate the deeply uncertain world that we live in. Examining how governments have responded to terrorist threats, climate change, and natural disasters, Coaffee shows how and why these measures have proven inadequate and what should be done to make us more resilient. While conventional approaches have focused on planning and preparing for disruptions and enhanced our ability to "bounce back," our focus should be on anticipating future challenges and enhancing our capacity to adapt to new threats.

Alaska is like no other state and few countries; men experience greater risk in her arms. This one-of-a-kind anthology captures the spine tingling adventures of daring men and women who venture into Alaska's vast wilderness and look death in the eye. "Danger Stalks the Land" relates gripping episodes of animal attacks, avalanches, aircraft disasters, fishing, hunting, and skiing accidents, and chronicles risky climbs and reckless mountaineering amid Alaska's fantastic peaks. Through exhaustive research and interviews, author Larry Kaniut has captured in one volume, the terror and beauty of man's attempt to explore a vast and unforgiving land.

On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the shockwaves of a 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake originating less than 50 miles off its eastern coastline. The most powerful earthquake to have hit Japan in recorded history, it produced a devastating tsunami with waves reaching heights of over 130 feet that in turn caused an unprecedented multireactor meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This triple catastrophe claimed almost 20,000 lives, destroyed whole towns, and will ultimately cost hundreds of billions of dollars for reconstruction.

In 3.11, Richard Samuels offers the first broad scholarly assessment of the disaster's impact on Japan's government and society. The events of March 2011 occurred after two decades of social and economic malaise as well as considerable political and administrative dysfunction at both the national and local levels and resulted in national soul-searching. Political reformers saw in the tragedy cause for hope: an opportunity for Japan to remake itself. Samuels explores Japan s post-earthquake actions in three key sectors: national security, energy policy, and local governance. For some reformers, 3.11 was a warning for Japan to overhaul its priorities and political processes. For others, it was a once-in-a-millennium event; they cautioned that while national policy could be improved, dramatic changes would be counterproductive. Still others declared that the catastrophe demonstrated the need to return to an idealized past and rebuild what has been lost to modernity and globalization.

Samuels chronicles the battles among these perspectives and analyzes various attempts to mobilize popular support by political entrepreneurs who repeatedly invoked three powerfully affective themes: leadership, community, and vulnerability. Assessing reformers successes and failures as they used the catastrophe to push their particular agendas and by examining the earthquake and its aftermath alongside prior disasters in Japan, China, and the United States Samuels outlines Japan s rhetoric of crisis and shows how it has come to define post-3.11 politics and public policy."

In recent years, the psychological effects of violence and warfare on civilian populations have increasingly become the focus of humanitarian relief operations. After both natural and man-made disasters, efforts to provide de-briefing, counselling and therapy for survivors are widely seen as an essential part of the emergency response. Much of the analysis of trauma has revolved around the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is now generally assumed that PTSD captures the fundamental psychological disturbance after any particular type of trauma or extreme event. However, there is now growing concern that models developed in Western psychiatry in response to trauma should not be used uncritically in societies that do not share the same cultural preoccupations. So rapid has been the response that there has been little time to reflect on the relevance of psyche-social trauma projects for local populations.

This book examines emerging concerns about the export of trauma experts and counsellors to war-tom areas of the world. The contributors are all professionals who are involved in helping adults and children rebuild their lives after witnessing the destruction of their families and communities. Based on their own experience of working internationally, this book presents both an analysis of current, misconceived, attempts to give help but also an agenda for future, more appropriate ways of responding to those affected by wars and conflicts.

When the terrorist attacks struck New York City on September 11, 2001, boat operators and waterfront workers quickly realized that they had the skills, the equipment, and the opportunity to take definite, immediate action in responding to the most significant destructive event in the United States in decades. For many of them, they were "doing what needed to be done." American Dunkirk shows how people, many of whom were volunteers, mobilized rescue efforts in various improvised and spontaneous ways on that fateful date. Disaster experts James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf examine the efforts through fieldwork and interviews with many of the participants to understand the evacuation and its larger implications for the entire practice of disaster management. The authors ultimately explore how people-as individuals, groups, and formal organizations-pull together to respond to and recover from startling, destructive events. American Dunkirk asks, What can these people and lessons teach us about not only surviving but thriving in the face of calamity?

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall less than four weeks apart in 2005. Months later, much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast remained in tatters. As the region faded from national headlines, its residents faced a dire future. Emmanuel David chronicles how one activist group confronted the crisis. Founded by a few elite white women in New Orleans, Women of the Storm quickly formed a broad coalition that sought to represent Louisiana's diverse population. From its early lobbying of Congress through its response to the 2010 BP oil spill, David shows how members' actions were shaped by gender, race, class, and geography. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and archival research, David tells a compelling story of collective action and personal transformation that expands our understanding of the aftermath of an historic American catastrophe.

Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming? Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental disasters, technological meltdowns-perennial subjects of literature, film, popular culture, and political debate. Is this preoccupation with catastrophe questionable alarmism or complacent passivity? Or are there certain truths that can be revealed only in apocalypse? In The Future as Catastrophe, Eva Horn offers a novel critique of the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War's apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned. Considering works by Lord Byron, J. G. Ballard, and Cormac McCarthy and films such as 12 Monkeys and Minority Report alongside scientific scenarios and political metaphors, she analyzes catastrophic thought experiments and the question of survival, the choices legitimized by imagined states of exception, and the contradictions inherent in preventative measures taken in the name of technical safety or political security. What makes today's obsession different from previous epochs' is the sense of a "catastrophe without event," a stealthily creeping process of disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and politically accessible.

Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11 focuses on the numerous stressors that have had an impact on today's emerging adults including climate change, school shootings, economic recession, and of course, the national trauma of 9/11. Disaster mental health expert Karla Vermeulen draws on a combination of statistics, academic sources, and her own original research, including results from a nationally representative survey, to examine these challenges as they are experienced by emerging adults who continue to fight for their future. The result is a corrective to previous works that dismiss "kids today" as fragile or entitled, and instead emphasizes the generation's strength in the face of unprecedented uncertainties and obstacles.

The pressure of climate change, environmental degradation, and urbanisation, as well as the widening of socio- economic disparities have rendered the global population increasingly vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. With a primary focus on medical and public health humanitarian response to disasters, Public Health Humanitarian Responses to Natural Disasters provides a timely critical analysis of public health responses to natural disasters. Using a number of case studies and examples of innovative disaster response measures developed by international agencies and stakeholders, this book illustrates how theoretical understanding of public health issues can be practically applied in the context of humanitarian relief response. Starting with an introduction to public health principles within the context of medical and public health disaster and humanitarian response, the book goes on to explore key trends, threats and challenges in contemporary disaster medical response. This book provides a comprehensive overview of an emergent discipline and offers a unique multidisciplinary perspective across a range of relevant topics including the concepts of disaster preparedness and resilience, and key challenges in human health needs for the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students of public health, disaster and emergency medicine and development studies, as well as to development and medical practitioners working within NGOs, development agencies, health authorities and public administration.

This book addresses all the special considerations important in planning for disasters, from natural disasters to acts of terrorism to catastrophic events.

It covers all aspects from assessing the risk prior to a disaster to the legal ramifications following a disaster. The text addresses the "how-tos" of avoiding the common mistakes which turn natural and man-made catastrophes into economic disasters. It encompasses not only the tried and true tactics used for decades but also focuses on areas often overlooked during the reactive and post disaster phases.

Organizations can be prepared and proactive by using this guide to make a disaster management plan before disaster strikes.

In 1985 in Columbia, more than 23,000 people died due to the government's failure to take seriously scientists' warnings about an imminent volcanic eruption at Nevado del Ruiz. In 1993, at Volcan Galeras, the death toll was smaller but no less tragic: despite seismic data that foretold possible disaster, an expedition of international scientists proceeded into the volcano. Two hours later, nine people were dead.Expertly detailing the turbulent history of Colombia, Victoria Bruce links together the stories of the heroes, villains, survivors, and victims of these two events. No Apparent Danger is a spellbinding account of clashing cultures and the life-and-death consequences of scientific arrogance.

Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible? Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the "maximin rule," which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of "Knightian uncertainty," found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.

The world's first independent black republic, Haiti was forged in the fire of history's only successful slave revolution. Yet more than two hundred years later, the full promise of that revolution - a free country and a free people - remains unfulfilled. Home for more than a decade to one of the world's largest UN peacekeeping forces, Haiti's tumultuous political culture - buffeted by coups and armed political partisans - combined with economic inequality and environmental degradation to create immense difficulties even before the devastating 2010 earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. This grim tale, however, is not the whole story. In this moving and detailed history, Michael Deibert, who has spent two decades reporting on Haiti, chronicles the heroic struggles of Haitians to build their longed-for country in the face of overwhelming odds. Based on hundreds of interviews with Haitian political leaders, international diplomats, peasant advocates and gang leaders, as well as ordinary Haitians, Deibert's book provides a vivid, complex and challenging analysis of Haiti's recent history.

Love and marriage, children and family, death and grief. Life touches everyone the same, but living under lockdown? It changes us alone. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet. 'Life Without Children is boldly exhilarating, with its revelations of quiet love and the sheer charm of the characters' voices' Sunday Times 'Quietly devastating...shivers with emotion' Financial Times 'In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection' Observer 'Moving...and beautiful' Daily Mail

With wit, humor, and an infectious love of astronomy that could win over even the science-phobic, this fun and fascinating book reminds us that outer space is anything but remote. The scientist behind the popular website badastronomy.com, Philip Plait presents some of the most fearsome end-of-the-world calamities (for instance, incoming asteroids and planet-swallowing black holes), demystifies the scientific principles at work behind them, and gives us the odds that any of them will step out of the realm of sci-fi to disrupt our quiet corner of the cosmos. The result is a book that is both terrifying and entertaining?a tour of the violent universe we live in, written with an enthusiasm that every stargazer will appreciate.

Epicentre to Aftermath makes both empirical and conceptual contributions to the growing body of disaster studies literature by providing an analysis of a disaster aftermath that is steeped in the political and cultural complexities of its social and historical context. Drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the book highlights the political, historical, cultural, artistic, emotional, temporal, embodied and material dynamics at play in the earthquake aftermath. Crucially, it shows that the experience and meaning of a disaster are not given or inevitable, but are the outcome of situated human agency. The book suggests a whole new epistemology of disaster consequences and their meanings, and dramatically expands the field of knowledge relevant to understanding disasters and their outcomes.

Lauren Carruth's Love and Liberation tells a new kind of humanitarian story. The protagonists are not volunteers from afar but rather Somali locals caring for each other: nurses, aid workers, policymakers, drivers, community health workers, and bureaucrats. The contributions of locals are often taken for granted, and the competencies, aspirations, and effectiveness of local staffers frequently remain muted or absent from the planning and evaluation of humanitarian interventions structured by outsiders. Relief work is traditionally imagined as politically neutral and impartial, and interventions are planned as temporary, extraordinary, and distant. Carruth provides an alternative vision of what "humanitarian" response means in practice-not driven by International Humanitarian Law, the missions of Western relief organizations, or trends in the aid industry or academia but instead by what Somalis call samafal. Samafal is structured by the cultivation of lasting relationships of care, interdependence, kinship, and ethnic solidarity. Samafal is also explicitly political and potentially emancipatory: humanitarian responses present opportunities for Somalis to begin to redress histories of colonial partitions and to make the most out of their political and economic marginalization. By centering Love and Liberation around Somalis' understanding and enactments of samafal, Carruth offers a new perspective on politics and intervention in Africa.