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Search Dogs Seeking Fake Disasters to Sniff

February 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Search Dog Founation Bios

Head up, nose twitching, a yellow Labrador named Nino bounded into action, zig-zagging across a jumble of rubble to try and catch the scent of a live human in the air. Following the directional signals of Jim, his handler, Nino headed for a 75-foot-by-25-foot area filled with mounds of debris containing wood, sheet metal, rebar, pipes, a wrecked car, bicycles, a mailbox, the remnants of an old bird pen and a horse trailer, all arranged to evoke the aftermath of homes demolished by a tornado. Nino followed the "cone of the scent," honing in on the area where the smell was the strongest. His ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, News and Options
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The Human Causes of Unnatural Disaster

February 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Blowout in the Gulf, a new book on Deepwater Horizon, opens with the observation that the ruined oil platform was dubbed Macondo, after the setting for the novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Written by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, the novel is an apocryphal tale of a prosperous town cut off from civilization, too self-involved to notice the signs of its own corruption. Ultimately, it is wiped off the face of the Earth in a deluge. The parallels were too thematically powerful for the authors of Blowout to ignore in their account of the BP Gulf oil ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Rx for Catastrophe

January 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Three days after Hurricane Katrina plowed into New Orleans, swamping 80 percent of the city, a group of 200 evacuees, most of them African-American, fled the wretched conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center and set out to find food and shelter in Gretna, a nearby white working-class suburb. When the evacuees arrived at the Crescent City Connection, a highway bridge that offered one of the few escape routes out of the flood, they were greeted by a line of white Gretna police officers who fired their shotguns into the air. Gretna, the police told the crowd, was “closed.” This ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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CSI: Pompeii

September 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Karl Brullov, "The Last Day of Pompeii," 1830-33. (Wikipedia.org) Click to enlarge.

Ever since 19th-century archaeologists started making plaster casts of the fallen inhabitants of Pompeii, it has been assumed they died from suffocation as a thick layer of ash fell on the town following a massive eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. But a new report from a team of Italian scientists tells a very different tale about what happened to the residents of the Roman town, and it has important implications for the 3 million people who today live around the world's most dangerous volcano. A meticulous study of bones, household objects and other evidence — a little like a ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science
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No Port After the Storm

August 31, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Madeline Luster's family has lived in the 7th Ward of New Orleans for generations. Her home is a five-minute walk from Tremé, the neighborhood featured on HBO's program of the same name. Having turned 90 in July, Luster still lives in the home she inherited from her mother, but faces bulging, waterlogged cracks in the walls and ceiling created by Hurricane Katrina. "I need new gutter cans," she said; her precarious gutters haven't been fixed since the storm. Luster’s shotgun-style house has an empty lot next to it, and a tree that fell across her back door was all that prevented looters ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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I See a Quake in Your Future. Sometime.

February 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Science is messy. For every step forward on the road to truth, there are two steps in some other direction. And the way toward earthquake prediction, the Holy Grail of seismology, is littered with the dashed hopes of those who have failed. "Even well-trained scientists, even brilliant scientists, can fool themselves in their quest to prove something they believe or want to be true," says Susan Hough in her engaging new book, Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction. "... It is a hard thing for any scientist to do, to admit they have been on a path that ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2010, Science, Science & Environment, Views Reviews and Interviews
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After the Aftermath

December 29, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

As children across the Sichuan Province of China sat at their school desks, an earthquake began rattling and knocking buildings to the ground. Felt 1,000 miles away in Beijing, the May 2008 quake would kill roughly 90,000 people, at least 5,300 of them children, according to figures from the Chinese government. Outside observers believe youth casualties are closer to 10,000, a result of the collapse of what Chinese critics later called "tofu dregs schoolhouses." Yang Zhang, a Chinese national and professor of urban planning at Virginia Tech whose research centers on disaster mitigation, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Health, January-February 2010, News and Options
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Fumbling FEMA Wants Back in the Game

October 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security gobbled up the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the 30-year-old bureaucracy that coordinates responses to natural disasters. The change left FEMA gutted and impotent, and when Hurricane Katrina struck two years later, the results were devastating. What's troubling, though, is that post-Katrina congressional reforms haven't fully addressed the agency's woes, argues North Carolina State University political science professor Thomas Birkland in a recent paper. Birkland, author of books such as Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after ... Read More

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How Could They Have Stayed Behind?

August 28, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

In the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina, many commentators and politicians expressed considerable frustration and puzzlement as to why so many people ignored the warnings and decided to stay in New Orleans. One — then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. — even suggested that, "There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving." But how much of a decision was it really? According to new study by a group of psychologists, to think of it as an active decision betrays a particular model of human ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society
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What Katrina Taught Us About Disaster Mental Health

May 27, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

To many, the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was an object lesson in what not to do. For experts in disaster mental health, though, Katrina was the ultimate teachable moment. Never before had so many Americans sought mental health care during a crisis, and never before had so many states and agencies requested funding to advise and treat them. Since shortly after the storm, researchers have been poring over data, trying to figure out what worked and what didn't, and hoping to learn something to help mental health providers when the next natural (or manmade) disaster ... Read More

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