Author : Ralph H. Turner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 29,59 MB
Release : 1986-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520055506
Examines how the media reported a bulge on the San Andreas Fault in 1976, describes the impact on public opinion, and suggests ways to encourage earthquake preparedness
Author : Elle M. Thomas
Publisher :
Page : 534 pages
File Size : 33,10 MB
Release : 2019-05-23
Category :
ISBN : 9781099143427
Disaster-in-Waiting is a story of love, passion and the realisation that everything you have ever known and imagined as your future may not be as secure or set in stone as you thought. Eloise Ross is married to Michael, her much older and recently retired husband. He fills his days with golf and walking the dog, while she fills her days working as a newly appointed P.A. to the CEO of an international company.One night, disillusioned with her sexless marriage she goes out alone, drinks beer and dances with a handsome stranger. The moves on the dance floor quickly lead to passion and excitement like El has never known, but it was only one night, one time. Just that once couldn't mean anything, could it?That once changed her view on everything she'd ever thought she'd known or valued; her home, family, responsibilities, husband and marriage, but most of all herself.As her life unravels, with twists and turns that make her laugh, cry and despair, El has only one constant to hang onto, her handsome stranger. However, with destiny intent on throwing them together, he becomes less and less of a stranger.With her inability to escape him and the feelings and thoughts he evokes in her spiralling out of control, her life takes on a route paved with lies, secrets and discoveries where the only destination is likely to be heartbreak and disaster.Disaster-in-Waiting is a mature romance intended for readers 18+
Author : Ralph H. Turner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 33,26 MB
Release : 2023-11-10
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0520329856
Author : National Academies
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 49,61 MB
Release : 2012-12-29
Category : Science
ISBN : 0309261503
No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
Author : David Etkin
Publisher : Butterworth-Heinemann
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 24,19 MB
Release : 2014-12-26
Category : Science
ISBN : 0128003553
Disaster Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Concepts and Causes offers the theoretical background needed to understand what disasters are and why they occur. Drawing on related disciplines, including sociology, risk theory, and seminal research on disasters and emergency management, Disaster Theory clearly lays out the conceptual framework of the emerging field of disaster studies. Tailored to the needs of advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this unique text also provides an ideal capstone for students who have already been introduced to the fundamentals of emergency management. Disaster Theory emphasizes the application of critical thinking in understanding disasters and their causes by synthesizing a wide range of information on theory and practice, including input from leading scholars in the field. - Offers the first cohesive depiction of disaster theory - Incorporates material from leading thinkers in the field, as well as student exercises and critical thinking questions, making this a rich resource for advanced courses - Written from an international perspective and includes case studies of disasters and hazards from around the world for comparing the leading models of emergency response - Challenges the reader to think critically about important questions in disaster management from various points of view
Author : Robert Meyer
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 133 pages
File Size : 17,20 MB
Release : 2017-02-07
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1613630794
"The Ostrich Paradox boldly addresses a key question of our time: Why are we humans so poor at dealing with disastrous risks, and what can we humans do about it? It is a must-read for everyone who cares about risk." —Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow We fail to evacuate when advised. We rebuild in flood zones. We don't wear helmets. We fail to purchase insurance. We would rather avoid the risk of "crying wolf" than sound an alarm. Our ability to foresee and protect against natural catastrophes has never been greater; yet, we consistently fail to heed the warnings and protect ourselves and our communities, with devastating consequences. What explains this contradiction? In The Ostrich Paradox, Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther draw on years of teaching and research to explain why disaster preparedness efforts consistently fall short. Filled with heartbreaking stories of loss and resilience, the book addresses: •How people make decisions when confronted with high-consequence, low-probability events—and how these decisions can go awry •The 6 biases that lead individuals, communities, and institutions to make grave errors that cost lives •The Behavioral Risk Audit, a systematic approach for improving preparedness by recognizing these biases and designing strategies that anticipate them •Why, if we are to be better prepared for disasters, we need to learn to be more like ostriches, not less Fast-reading and critically important, The Ostrich Paradox is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we consistently underprepare for disasters, as well as private and public leaders, planners, and policy-makers who want to build more prepared communities.
Author : Naomi Klein
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 721 pages
File Size : 35,70 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1429919485
The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
Author : Heather Havrilesky
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 41,80 MB
Release : 2010-12-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1101446064
"Smart, hilarious, unique-- just terrific." --Anne Lamott A thoughtful, witty memoir from the author of How to Be a Person in the World and the popular advice column, Ask Polly. When Heather Havrilesky was a kid during the '70s, harrowing disaster films dominated every movie screen with earthquakes that destroyed huge cities, airplanes that plummeted towards the ground and giant sharks that ripped teenagers to shreds. Between her parents' dramatic clashes and her older siblings' hazing, Heather's home life sometimes mirrored the chaos onscreen. Disaster Preparedness charts how the most humiliating and painful moments in Havrilesky's past forced her to develop a wide range of defense mechanisms, some adaptive, some piteously ill-suited to modern life. From premature boxing lessons to the competitive grooming of cheerleading camp, from her parents' divorce to her father's sudden death, Havrilesky explores a path from innocence and optimism to self-protection and caution, bravely reexamining the injuries that shaped her, the lessons that sunk in along the way, and the insights that carried her through. Disaster Preparedness is a road map to the personal disasters we all face from an irresistible voice that gets straight to the beauty and grace at the heart of every calamity.
Author :
Publisher :
Page : 116 pages
File Size : 29,63 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Disaster relief
ISBN :
Accompanying CD-ROM contains additional supporting materials, sample electronic slide presentations, and other resources.
Author : D. Bradford Hunt
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 17,28 MB
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226360873
Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.
