Calamitous Events Research Articles

Crisis Communication Post Katrina: What are we Learning?

Hurricane Katrina and post-Katrina audits are an on-going project for public affairs scholarship. Much has been written but critical frameworks of analysis are minimal. Crisis communication taxonomies are rich and fruitful in understanding the framing of calamitous events. In revisiting a previous mapping of crisis communication vulnerability points in the Katrina tragedy, the authors provide a further “vulnerability audit” of crisis-communication capabilities within a changing political/administrative ontology—one pointing to the privatization of crises/disasters within the Neo-liberal state. Lessons about crisis communication according to the earlier four conceptual lenses (Garnett and Kouzmin 2007) are supported by more recent developments and scholarship.

The Bay of Pigs

In The Bay of Pigs, Howard Jones has given us the finest narrative yet written about that calamitous event in United States-Cuban relations. Writing with an arresting style and drawing on a bevy of English-language sources, Jones re-creates the drama of the Bay of Pigs. He brings to life not only the operation on Cuba's southern shore but also the tensions among policy makers in the U.S. government as they tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution. Woven together, these two threads of the story fashion a tapestry of tragedy and hubris. The ill-fated invasion remains a tragedy because of those who lost their lives in the assault against, or in the defense of, their beloved homeland. Those in Washington who arrogated to themselves the right to alter the course of Cuban history did so without noticeable circumspection. The failure of April 17, 1961, exposed the enormity of their hubris. The general history of the Bay of Pigs is well known. Especially revealing here is the account of how the site of the invasion was chosen from two alternatives, neither of which offered any hope of success without U.S. air cover. The lies that Americans told invasion leaders about military assistance are a reminder of how security assets are easily jettisoned in pursuit of competing interests—in this case American prestige. U.S. aid to the counterrevolutionary forces did not materialize because of the foolish belief that the administration of John F. Kennedy could maintain plausible deniability about its role in the operation. With an American, Grayston Lynch, the first to land and the first to fight at the Bay of Pigs, plausible deniability quickly became the fiction it really was.

Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus

This essay defends Shakespeare’s character Titus Andronicus against recent criticism by arguing that the calamitous events in Titus Andronicus are not caused by Titus behaving badly but by the construction of the play around a textual tradition that offers only sacrifice as an alternative to war. By demonstrating how Titus’s actions might be read plausibly as the best possible reactions to an already bad situation, I argue that the greatest force of violence in the play is misreading and that the play’s ultimate question is how a peaceful future can grow out of a bloody past.

Memorial museums: the global rush to commemorate atrocities

1. A Very Different Proposition: Introducing the Memorial Museum 2. The Surviving Object: Presence and Absence in Memorial Museums 3. Photographic Memory: Commemorating Calamitous Events through Images 4. Rocks and Hard Places: Location and Spatiality in Memorial Museums 5. A Diplomatic Assignment: The Political Fortunes of Memorial Museums 6. The Memorial Museum Identity Complex: Victimhood, Culpability, and Responsibility 7. Looming Disaster: Memorial Museums and the Shaping of Historic Consciousness 8. Conclusion: Fighting the Forgetful Future

Acting “Tough” in a “Tough” World: An Examination of Fear Among Urban African American Adolescents

African American adolescents (132 males and 128 females; age M = 14.8 years, SD = 0.92) enrolled in an urban community social skills development program participated in a study assessing the relationship among perceptions of family and community social support, fear of calamitous events, depression, and anger expression. Expressing fear of calamitous events that were considered harmful but not necessarily lethal was related to increased depression, whereas expressing fear of lethal calamitous events was related to increased anger expression. Results are discussed in terms of issues of race, gender, and adolescent development.

Pulling Strings to Untangle Catastrophe

AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY MEETINGDENVER, COLORADO-- Tugging on string to see how the force required to break it varied with its length may yield insights into calamitous events such as the sudden failure of cables on a suspension bridge, physicists announced at the American Physical Society meeting held here from 5 to 9 March. ([Read more][1].) [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5821/47

Assessing the efficiency and the criticality of the elements belonging to a complex territorial system subject to natural hazards

Abstract. The effects of natural hazards can be mitigated by the use of proper "pre-event" interventions on "key" elements of the territory, that is on elements that are mostly vulnerable to a given catastrophic scenario and whose loss of functionality can cause damages on people, property and environment. In this respect, methodologies and tools should be studied to support decision makers in the analysis of a territory, in order to point out such elements. In this work, vulnerability is taken into account under two aspects: "physical vulnerability", which measures the propensity of a territorial element to suffer damage when subject to an external stress corresponding to the occurrence of a natural phenomenon; "functional vulnerability", which measures the propensity of a territorial element to suffer loss in functionality, even when that is caused by the loss of functionality of other territorial elements. In the proposed modeling approach, vulnerability is represented through the use of a graph-based formalization. A territorial system is represented as a complex set of elements or sub-systems. Such elements have differentiated and dedicated functions, and they may be functionally interconnected among them. In addition, vulnerability is defined through the use of two different variables, namely the criticality and the efficiency. Focusing the attention on the temporal phases corresponding to the occurrence of a calamitous event, the first one measures the service demand of an element, whereas the efficiency is a measure of the service that can be offered by such an element. The approach presented is largely independent from the natural risk considered. Besides, the tools introduced for the vulnerability analysis of the territorial system can also be used to formalize decision problems relevant to the location of the available resources for emergency management. A specific case study pertaining to the hydrological risk in the Val di Vara area (Italy) is presented.

Toward a National Disaster Response Protocol

Since the Florence flood of November 4, 1966, the concept of an or ganized disaster response for cultural property has been a focus for conservators. In 1976, a decade after the Arno River had retreated from Florence's museums, libraries, and historic churches, a Library of Congress planning conference convened to initiate a U.S. national preservation program. At that meeting Stephen Salmon noted a glaring . . . lack of preparedness for disaster [s] by almost all American librar ies.1 Now, forty years since that calamitous flood, little has changed in terms of being able to initiate a nationally coordinated plan in the face of calamitous events that threaten cultural property in all collect ing institutions. In fact, it is now clearly recognized that only one in five cultural institutions has created an emergency response plan that encompasses collections,2 and it is likely that some or all of these plans will prove ineffectual in the case of a regional disaster. Furthermore, according to meteorologists at the National Oceanographic and Atmo spheric Administration, we now face in the next twenty to thirty years the possibility of stronger, more damaging storms capable of threatening our cultural institutions.3 Ample evidence is at hand that a national disaster response protocol is urgently needed if we are to ensure that irreplaceable cultural collec tions are not needlessly lost. This protocol must be able to be activated quickly to deliver appropriate assistance to affected institutions and, accordingly, be unencumbered by day-to-day bureaucracies that his torically have delayed response time and increased collection damage. This essay describes two recent large institutional catastrophes as well as the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, an unprecedented U.S. regional disaster, in an effort to underscore the importance of creating a nonprofit entity?the National Disaster Center for Cultural Property (NDC)?capable of implementing an effective response in situations where local resources and expertise are overwhelmed and cultural property is at risk.

A Real-time System For Remote Co-ordination OfRescue Teams In An Emergency Phase

This paper describes how organization and coordination of rescue teams acting in the field are crucial issues for public bodies in institutions that have to guarantee help and support both in times of peace and in phases of crisis. A perfect synergy of the rescue parties permits one to intervene in an efficient and precise way during calamitous events, effectively directing the operations of the emergency, reducing the times of intervention and optimizing the human resources. The system proposed in this paper has been developed for the “operational Room” of the Civil Defense of the Siena Province (Italy), working primarily in emergency situations. It allows the visualization and the real-time tracking of the rescue parties acting the field, through an “Intelligent Board” installed in the Operational Room. The localization is visualized on Geographic Information System (GIS) maps and it can be implemented both through dedicated software, allowing high analysis capabilities, and through web browsers, enabling remote visualizations. The rescue teams are equipped with palmtop devices with networking capabilities, in order to communicate with the Operational Room and to point out in real time the occurrence of certain calamitous events (i.e. interrupted load, landslide, accident, etc.), thus allowing the coordination and distribution of these data to all the other rescue parties.

Textbooks, School Reform, and the Silver Lining

HELL-IN-a-hand-basket doomsayers. Ya gotta love 'em. These modern Minutemen stand stoically ready to snatch the lantern, scurry to the Old North Church, scramble up the rickety stairs, and alert a sleeping countryside, always just in time to avert a cataclysm. But their warnings are form than substance, and the dangers they foresee are like tempests in a teapot than Armageddon. As a result, I find their premonitions useful as sources of amusement and irritation than as prophecies. That makes it easy to resist their pessimism, drama, and quick-fix blarney. So how could it be that today I find myself frighteningly close to abandoning my writing, searching through my junk drawer for matches, lighting the lantern, and elbowing for space in the crowded church steeple? The very thought riddles my psyche with anxiety and torments my conscious mind. I want to tell you that my angst is the aftermath of some calamitous event -- that I was hit by lightning or abducted by aliens. But no. The opposite is true. I don't recall anything out of the ordinary. It all started when I decided to learn about how textbooks present Native Americans and Native American history. So, I read some textbooks. I wasn't surprised. Textbooks treat Native peoples in pretty much the same way society treats them -- as an afterthought brought into our collective consciousness only as they serve our interests and tell our story. But that's not the news here. fact, finding that textbooks ignore Native Americans would hardly have been worth developing the charts and graphs or accumulating the piles of data that currently clutter my office floor. Nor is it news that I found the texts unbalanced. History is, after all, merely a tale told by the winners. They get to decide which stories are told and from what perspective. They get to choose the villains and heroes; they get to assign motives, values, and morality. And it is not breaking news that I found an abundance of factual inaccuracies, flat-out fabrications, transmissions of myth as reality, glaring omissions, and best-case interpretations of historically shameful events. A quick re-read of James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me would have revealed as much. Looking back, though, it seems my arteries started to clog and the blood began to drain from my brain about the time I found a short article by Frank Wang titled How Textbooks and the Considerable Economic Resources of Textbook Publishers Can Be Used to Improve Student Achievement. A Google search for effectiveness research brought it to my computer screen, and I was taken with an illustrative little story it tells. North Carolina, textbooks are approved for funding by a relatively small group of people called the textbook adoption committee. According to Wang, this is an idiotic system. As evidence, he offers the aforementioned story, which has to do with how one man used the political system to change history -- at least as told by one textbook. Wang reports that between 1966 and the late Eighties, students using an unnamed textbook read more . . . about . . . a relatively obscure [battle at] Moore's Creek than either the Boston Tea Party or the First Continental Congress. He quips, In this case, Moore is less. As Wang tells it, it happened this way. Just one committee member -- a descendant of a carpetbagger, no doubt -- was unwilling to approve the textbook for state use until the battle, which was fought on a bridge over a little creek that runs near his home, was added to the text. The member held out; the publisher caved in. Once the text's content was revised . . . [to include] . . . about Moore's Creek, the member was satisfied, the textbook was approved, and the textbooks were distributed to classrooms across America. But why would a textbook company bend to one man's will? Aren't those companies themselves the rightful authors of history? …

CERTAINTY IN UNCERTAIN TIMES: CONSIDERING FORCE MAJEURE

Force majeure clauses are particularly relevant to at least two types of oil and gas agreements: operating agreements and long-term contracts. Each type of contract is characteristically exposed to calamitous events that can take many years to manifest. However, force majeure clauses in each type of contract need to reflect the commercial realities and bargain represented by each type of contract.This paper considers whether the types of force majeure clauses that are used in the Australian oil and gas industry would adequately excuse a party relying on them from performing their obligations under a contract in light of some very real 21st century concerns. The beginning of the 21st century has seen remarkable technological development and the creation of a global village where an isolated event in one part of the world can have a significant effect on the entire world. Therefore, the increased likelihood of a terrorist attack against significant infrastructure (eg. an offshore oil rig or gas pipeline) and the emergence of natural phenomena, particularly widespread viral outbreaks such as the SARS virus can have a devastating effect on industry globally, as is being seen in the airline industry. There is some doubt whether standard contract clauses will automatically treat such circumstances as force majeure events.The paper suggests that certain drafting conventions ought to be adopted to address 21st century concerns, and particularly to provide practical solutions for these issues.

Understanding PTSD: Forgetting “Trauma”

The concept of “psychological trauma” conflates emotional responses to traumatic events such as motor vehicle accidents, muggings, and house fires, responses to natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and responses to war, chronic physical abuse, prolonged torture, and repeated gang‐rape as an act of “ethnic cleansing.” It is argued that, from a psychological, human, and moral perspective, use of a single construct to describe responses to such a range of horrific happenings makes no sense. The benefits and limits of conceptualizing PTSD as a unifying concept for describing psychological responses to calamitous events are discussed. The consequences (with respect to clinical work, research, and social policy) of failing to distinguish between responses to relatively circumscribed traumatic events, more extreme, prolonged, or repeated individual traumatization, and collectively experienced mass violence against entire communities are examined.

Seize the Day

Andrew Cohen, who has covered international affairs at home and abroad as a journalist for 25 years, is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.The themes of this article are explored further in While Canada Slept: How We Lost our Place in the World, to be published by McClelland & Stewart in May, 2003.A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE CALAMITOUS EVENTS of 11 September 2001, John Manley, then Canada's minister of foreign affairs, mused about Canada and its place in the world. More lawyer than diplomat, Manley was artlessly and unusually frank in conversation with journalists. 'We are still trading on our reputation that was built two generations and more ago,' he complained, 'but that we haven't continued to live up to. You can't just sit at the G-8 table and then, when the bill comes, go to the washroom. If you want to play a role in the world, even as a small member of the G-8, there's a cost to doing that.' He cited 'the glaring inadequacy' of Canada's capacity in areas of foreign and defence policy and how that weakness was compromising its ability to honour its traditional commitments overseas.Manley did not withdraw his comments when he was received coolly in cabinet. Indeed, the next day he reiterated that 'a lot of things have changed since 11 September. And one of those is that the burden that we are going to have to be asked to bear internationally is going to become greater. And we're not going to have an option, if we intend to play the influential role we have in the past... without shouldering the burden.'Manley, who has almost ten years experience as minister, has a penchant for making direct, provocative remarks; over the next few months, after he was appointed finance minister and deputy prime minister, he would cause a tempest when he questioned the meaning of the monarchy in Canada during a visit to the country by Queen Elizabeth. Amid the puree of platitudes that passes for truth in Ottawa these days, though, his lament had a ring of authenticity. It was a siren call to a country whose presence in the world is a shadow of its former self.Manley speaks of a sense of Canada beyond its shores that is narrower today than it was in the past, especially in the decade or so after the Second World War. Canada is no longer as strong a soldier, as generous a donor, or as effective a diplomat. This reality is apparent to anyone who examines the strength of Canada's military, the size and reach of its official development assistance, and the quality and stature of its foreign service. Canada's decline is not a secret - it has been obvious in some areas for decades - but it is only now, as our obligations grow, that our weakness is more accentuated and the gap between our resources and our rhetoric is more acute.A sceptic might ask: Decline? What decline? At first glance, Canada seems to be as engaged internationally as ever. Indeed, surveying the breadth of Canada's roles abroad, a visitor to Canada in 2002 might reasonably wonder what all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing was about.After all, there was Jean Chretien playing host to the leaders of the world's richest industrialized nations last June in Kananaskis, Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, confirming Canada as a member of the inner circle of the world's biggest economies - even if economists argue that it no longer deserves to be there. While the G-8 is the most exclusive club to which Canada belongs, it is only one of many. Beyond the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization of American States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Commonwealth of Nations and la francophonie - most of which Canada helped found - Canada is a member of virtually every other agency and organization, big or small, global or regional. …

Searching for a holistic paradigm and policy guide: a proposal for the future of emergency management

The following article illustrates that whilst the disaster resistant community, disaster resilient community and sustainable concepts provide many unique advantages for disaster scholarship and management, they fail to sufficiently address each of the hazards, phases, actors, variables and disciplines pertaining to calamitous events. In making this argument, the paper asserts that any future paradigm and policy guide must be built on - yet go further than - comprehensive emergency management. The article also notes the importance of vulnerability as it relates to disasters, and consequently suggests that invulnerable development - a process of vulnerability management - is better suited to guide scholarly and practitioner efforts to understand and reduce disasters.

A Comparison of Disaster Paradigms: The Search for a Holistic Policy Guide

The following article discusses the current emphasis and attention being given to the future of emergency management, as well as theoretical constructs designed to guide research and help practitioners reduce disaster. It illustrates that while the disaster‐resistant community, disaster‐resilient community, and sustainable development/sustainable hazards mitigation concepts provide many unique advantages for disaster scholarship and management, they fail to sufficiently address the triggering agents, functional areas, actors, variables, and disciplines pertaining to calamitous events. In making this argument, the article asserts that any future paradigm and policy guide must be built on—yet go further than—comprehensive emergency management. The article also reviews and alters the concept of invulnerable development. Finally, the article presents “comprehensive vulnerability management” as a paradigm and suggests that it is better suited to guide scholarly and practitioner efforts to understand and reduce disasters than the aforementioned perspectives.

Triggering agents, vulnerabilities and disaster reduction: towards a holistic paradigm

Discusses the nature of disaster and the future of emergency management. After exploring differing historical perspectives of disaster, puts forth a model of vulnerability and highlights the plethora of factors that contribute to calamitous events. Introduces the concept of invulnerable development as a method of vulnerability management and compares it to other terms that have been proposed as guides for future disaster policy. The central argument to be made is that vulnerability is, or should be, the key concept for disaster scholarship and reduction.

Women's experiences of 'being diagnosed' with a long-term illness.

In this paper we share women's storied accounts of 'being diagnosed' with a long-term illness. The purpose of the paper is to raise awareness of health professionals that receiving a medical diagnosis is a potentially calamitous event, challenging self-identity. The three authors were involved in three separate inquiries which explored women's experiences of living with illness. The authors realized that 'being diagnosed' was a common memorable event for the women across the inquiries. The literature around receiving a diagnosis was scarce. This paper is the result of secondary analysis of data from three different projects where we researched women living with long-term illness. In this paper, we focus on the experience of 'being diagnosed' as we share and show women's perceptions of receiving a medical diagnosis. Receiving a medical diagnosis of a long-term illness was a memorable event in the women's lives. Many women felt alone with their illness, often without adequate information to find meaning in the relationship between their familiar self and their new identity as a woman living with illness. They felt vulnerable and lost as they tried to understand the meanings and consequences that the diagnosis held for their present and their future. Informational needs may be specific and individual. For many, receipt of a diagnostic label was momentous and should not be underestimated, despite the initial feeling of chaos, many women felt validated. Receiving a medical diagnosis is one event where health care professionals could be on standby. It is important to take the woman's articulation of the event seriously. Open, genuine communication, with willingness on behalf of the health professional to listen would be affirming for women who are coming to terms with the diagnosis of a chronic illness.

The Russian pharmaceutical market after the crisis: An insider's view

The average citizen of Russia consumes US$20 worth of medicines, including US$8 worth of domestically produced medicines. Although this lags far behind levels in the more developed Western markets (for instance, US$156 in France, US$178 in USA), the large size and enormous growth potential of the Russian market means that it remains one of the most important developing markets for global pharmaceutical companies. Any understanding of this complex and evolving market must begin with an appreciation of a watershed in its history — the macro-economic crisis of August 1998. This calamitous event divided the history of the pharmaceutical market into two distinct periods — ‘before’ and ‘after’ the crisis. To this day, industry professionals refer to ‘before crisis’ as a prosperous, dynamic, successful time. Managing in today's Russian pharmaceutical market means understanding that period and what has happened since.

Mimesis as Cultural Survival

Focusing on Judith Butler's highly influential work on gender, this article draws attention to a certain feminist inheritance of an emphasis on mimesis and imitation that resonates with the ways in which theoreticians responded to the calamitous events of essentialist politics and versions of belonging that were central to the political vision of Hitler's National Socialism and to the events of the Second World War. The intention is to point to this trajectory, to give Butler's work a genealogy that traces the notion of mimesis back into work which employed the concept within socio-theoretical responses to anti-Semitism, in order to initiate a discussion of mimesis in a new contemporary agenda. The question of mimesis in this new agenda is significant in its reutilization of the concept in a way that moves the focus away from assumptions of the repressed natural process that underpinned Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis, and towards the complex manoeuvres of continued performances and continued `tradition', away from judgements of authenticity and towards the reasons why people maintain certain embodied subjectivities. Such a perspective raises the questions of generational relations, of foreclosed possibilities and of affective attachments to identity that reach beyond the Nietzschean sense of a wounded attachment. A focus on the responsibilities and pressures of `cultural survival' seems fruitful as a guiding concept in this exploration of the connections between identification, affiliation and the power contexts within which mimesis, as a form of repetition or `citation', occurs.

The effects of disasters on children: implications for emergency nurses.

The word disaster implies a sudden and calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction.’ Disasters have an impact on the lives of everyone involved, including children. The purposes of this article are to describe children’s responses to disasters, to review the effects of a disaster on children, and to identify interventions for the emergency nurse to assist children and their families to cope with the aftermath of a disaster.