Unnatural Disasters Research Articles

Unnatural Disasters by Jeff Hirsch

Unnatural Disasters by Jeff Hirsch

Generating Multiple Resilience Dividends from Managing Unnatural Disasters in Asia: Opportunities for Measurement and Policy

Despite solid evidence regarding the large benefits of reducing disaster risk, it has remained difficult to motivate sustained investment into disaster risk reduction (DRR). Recently, international policy debate has started to emphasize the need for focusing DRR investment toward actions that generate multiple dividends, including reducing loss of lives and livelihoods, unlocking development, and creating development cobenefits. We examine whether available and innovative decision support tools are fit-for-purpose. Focusing on the Asia region, we identify evidence of multiple dividends crafted using expert-based methods, such as cost–benefit analysis for selecting and evaluating “hard-resilience-type” interventions. Given a rising demand for “softer” and systemic DRR investments in projects and programs, participatory decision support tools have become increasingly relevant. As one set of tools, resilience capacity (capital) measurement approaches may be used to support actions and decisions throughout all stages of the project cycle. Measuring capacity for resilience dividends, not outcome, such tools can serve as participatory decision support for organizations working at community and other levels for scoping out how development and disaster risk interact, as well as for supporting the cogeneration of multiple resilience dividend-type solutions with those at risk.

Structure design of a miniature and jumping robot for search and rescue

The extremely dangerous and complex environment caused by tremendous earthquakes or unnatural disasters usually brings great danger to survivors and salvagers. Therefore, search and rescue missions after any disaster indicate a huge need in special access to reduce the loss for human beings and, at the same time, to improve the capability of performing the tasks. In terms of the miniature robots which can go into the confined zone for the searching tasks, this project focuses specially on analysing climbing obstacle capability of the miniature robots, and introduces a new concept composed of a jumping robot which is mounted on a tracked mobile base. To design, calculate, and analyse this system, an appropriate mechanism, geometric dimensions, and specific properties are detailed, which include a dual-tracked articulated transformable locomotion system, a transmission system with a sleeve shaft, an incomplete gear jumping mechanism, and the selection and calculation of power system motors. To complete the design procedure, a three-dimensional sketch of each component of the robot was generated by means of Solidworks.

Fueling and delinking from energy coloniality in Puerto Rico

ABSTRACTIn September 2017, Hurricane María rattled Puerto Rico and its Caribbean neighbors. To study this US colony’s post-hurricane crises, long-time histories and present experiences with what I call ‘energy coloniality’ and ‘energy privilege’ must be foregrounded. This approach allows for an understanding of this unnatural disaster as just one of countless systemic colonial and neoliberal entwined cruelties, driven by disaster capitalism. Informed by fieldwork and years of ‘e-advocacy,’ I critique four rhetorical problems that shape everyday and extraordinary emergencies in Puerto Rico. While I focus on this archipelago, hegemonic emergency discourses are widespread and linked to what I term the ‘emergency manager effect.’ This shock doctrine outcome is constituted by neoliberal and colonial governance and discourses, whereby undemocratically appointed overseers manage local places and peoples, who are perceived as anachronistic and incapable of solving problems independently. Delinking from these exploitative strategies and systems requires intervening in the entanglements of energy coloniality, energy privilege, and neoliberalism, as reckless extractivism continues to disproportionately target frontline communities.

Licia’s Lectures on Nothing

Licia’s Lectures on Nothing

Energy Colonialism Powers the Ongoing Unnatural Disaster in Puerto Rico

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. Blasting the Caribbean archipelago with 155-mile-per-hour winds, this, in many ways, unnatural disaster exposed the brutal consequences of energy colonialism and an extractivist economy, as well as ongoing and increasing advocacy for decentralized solar infrastructure by many local residents and other renewables supporters. This paper argues that acknowledging colonial power relations is essential for studying the significance of energy democracy in Puerto Rico and the interplay of energy systems, environments, and stakeholders. To support this claim, this essay outlines Puerto Rico’s history as a US colony by focusing on key policies and their implications; examines openings for and barriers to decentralized, community solar in Puerto Rico; and concludes by discussing future research directions on just energy transitions and the imperative of uprooting colonialism and agitating for community self-determination and energy justice in these transformations.

Culture, Class, and Unnatural Disasters in 1910s and 1920s North America

Culture, Class, and Unnatural Disasters in 1910s and 1920s North America Marian Moser Jones (bio) Jacob A. C. Remes. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xi + 199 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Susan Scott Parrish. The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. xi + 295 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. These days nearly every news image of a flood-drowned neighborhood or a storm pinwheeling furiously toward a coastline is accompanied by commentary about human-induced climate change. Yet we still tend to view disasters as something outside of ourselves. The traditional concept of disasters as "Acts of God" has been overlaid by the modernist construct of disasters as objective meteorological, geological, or technological events that can be mitigated rationally through better scientific and social engineering, whether it is better warning systems or more clear-cut response protocols. Two new works remind us how these tensions—between the modernist disaster construct and the reality of modern disasters as inescapably political, cultural, and social phenomena—originated in the early twentieth century. These works, Jacob A. C. Remes's Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era and Susan Scott Parrish's The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History, offer analyses of the 1914 Salem, Massachusetts fire, the 1917 munitions explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the 1927 Mississippi Flood. The authors use these case studies to illustrate how disasters can transcend and reshape the ordinary politics of region and nation, alter the cultural fabric, and permanently reconfigure the relationship between citizens and the state. While each work stands on its own, together Remes and Parrish provide a damning critique of the modernist disaster construct. Just as current-day experts apply a "solutionist" framework to disaster, in which they seek "technical and engineering solutions to social and political problems," sociologists of the 1920s and '30s, Remes writes, took a similar problem-solving approach to disaster (p. 199). As Parrish notes, they believed disasters actually improved [End Page 619] society by "getting problems quickly out in the open to be solved" (p. 19). This conviction stemmed from the Progressive Era idea that disasters provided opportunities for professional experts such as social workers, government reformers and philanthropic businessmen to reorganize society to become more efficient and productive—an assumption that Remes undercuts with his biting analysis of the stingy and invasive actions of social workers in Salem and Halifax. The problem-solving disaster construct also owes much to once-prevalent scientific dogma that nature was moving toward ever-greater levels of equilibrium. Social scientists borrowed from this dogma and came to regard disasters as opportunities for society to reorganize itself and attain a state of greater stability. But the 1927 flood, in which the Mississippi River, after an unusually wet winter, burst through the system of levees designed to contain it, "suggested that nature's unpredictability could not be engineered into placidity," Parrish states (p. 19). Furthermore, the flood forced half a million African-American sharecroppers into squalid, segregated refugee camps, and failed to produce the type of social improvements sociologists envisioned. Instead, Parrish concludes, it demonstrated "that catastrophe was the abiding, everyday reality of Jim Crow" (p. 19). Remes confines his study to two events he characterizes as "working class" disasters, because they overwhelmingly affected wage laborers and their families. The 1914 Salem, Massachusetts fire, which started in a patent leather factory, destroyed over 3,000 homes and 50 factories, and left much of the working-class population homeless and jobless. The December 1917 Halifax explosion resulted when a ship carrying munitions for the Allied Armies in World War I collided with another ship. The blast—the largest man-made explosion prior to Hiroshima—blew through the working-class neighborhoods that adjoined the harbor, flattening houses and sending "shards of windowglass flying like daggers," Remes writes (p. 22). Over 2,000 people died that day, 9,000 were injured and 25,000 lost their homes. In both cases, Remes shows how families, neighbors, and community members helped care for and shelter those injured or rendered homeless, and helped...

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

A Bi-objective Stochastic Optimization Model for Humanitarian Relief Chain by Using Evolutionary Algorithms

Due to the increasing amount of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods and unnatural disasters such as war and terrorist attacks, Humanitarian Relief Chain (HRC) is taken into consideration of most countries. Besides, this paper aims to contribute humanitarian relief chains under uncertainty. In this paper, we address a humanitarian logistics network design problem including local distribution centers (LDCs) and multiple central warehouses (CWs) and develop a scenario-based stochastic programming (SBSP) approach. Also, the uncertainty associated with demand and supply information as well as the availability of the transportation network's routes level after an earthquake are considered by employing stochastic optimization. While the proposed model attempts to minimize the total costs of the relief chain, it implicitly minimize the maximum travel time between each pair of facility and the demand point of the items. Additionally, a data set derived from a real disaster case study in the Iran area, and to solve the proposed model a exact method called ɛ-constraint in low dimension along with some well-known evolutionary algorithms are applied. Also, to achieve good performance, the parameters of these algorithms are tuned by using Taguchi method. In addition, the proposed algorithms are compared via four multi-objective metrics and statistically method. Based on the results, it was shown that: NSGA-II shows better performances in terms of SNS and CPU time, meanwhile, for NPS and MID, MRGA has better performances. Finally, some comments for future researches are suggested.

Vulnerability Assessment of Rural Settlements Versus Earthquake by Approach to Crisis Management in Fars Province

Extended abstract 1. INTRODUCTION Iran is located in the active region of the world in terms of seismicity and according to the scientific documentation information and observations of the twentieth century is considered the riskiest region of the world by powerful earthquake. As a widely-accepted fact that “earthquake does not kill people but the buildings do” we know the overwhelming relevance of this fact. Majority of deaths and injuries in earthquake incidence occur because of the collision and collapse of buildings and other human made structures resulting in the loss of lives, property and social disruption. Therefore, in order to reduce risk, crisis management should go towards to the standardization of building materials, increasing reliability and safety in new construction, guiding urbanization system and development of urban and rural settlements. In this case, the rural communities are very important. 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The vulnerability is a conception that occur according to the physical and natural characteristics of phenomena against natural and unnatural disasters. Determining the amount of vulnerability internal elements of risk of environment is of the requirements to determine risk. One of the most important parts of human life is residential buildings. Vulnerability of buildings is physical vulnerability and the damage to human lives and health is human vulnerability. There are many aspects of vulnerability, arising from various physical, social, economic, and environmental factors. According to research topics, the study approach is physical. Thus, according to this approach and crisis management approach vulnerability assessment of rural housing was done against earthquake. 3. METHODOLOGY The research method is descriptive and analytical. For data collection, library and documentary method were used, and data that we required were collected by using census data library data, Internet and etc. in this study, statistical population consisted of all rurals in Fars province. Also, analysis unit was the county of Fars. To create a database and mapping, Geographic information system software and Excel were used. In fact, for integration of information, layers in GIS and spatial analysis were used overlay layers and analytic hierarchy process methods. Also, for seismic hazard zonation and creating layers, inverse distance weighted interpolation method (IDW) and proximity function were used. 4. DISCUSSION About 2026 earthquake happened in Fars province that most earthquakes occurred with 8.3 of magnitude on the Richter scale that frequency of them was 110. In fact, given the frequency of earthquakes, most of them are less than 4 on the Richter scale. Also, according to the region that earthquake happened, the largest earthquake occurred in the Lar county (358 cases). Historical Earthquake Survey shows that most destructive earthquakes occurred in Larestan in the past. Generally, the most earthquakes occurred in Lar, Kazeroun, Jahrom, Qyr & karzyn, Nourabad and Firozabad. Hazard zonation was done using earthquakes, faults and lithology and Fars province was divided into five zones. Then, population, housing and infrastructure of rural settlements were evaluated in these zones. The greatest number of settlements (2,700 settlements rural of 3,273) and more than 290,000 housing of total of 346,814 are in high and too high-risk areas in Fars province. Generally, 47 percent of the total of rural housing have an area less than 100 square meters, 90% of them are non-resistant structures and 6. 91% of them are over 35 years old. These information show necessity of reconstruction, improvements and retrofitting of structures in rural areas. 5. CONCLUSION The results of this study, same as other studies that were done in other provinces indicate non-resistant and outwear of rural housing. More than 85 percent of the province's areas and more than 85 percent of the rural settlements, the population, housing and infrastructures of them are located in areas with high risk of earthquakes. In fact, most of the rural population in Fars province have lived in areas that not only are disposable the serious risk of earthquakes, but also these residential buildings are non-resistant and outwear. Even if the earthquake does not cause deaths and casualties by itself, these causes will provide by non-resistant and outwear buildings and collapses from these structures. Some of the recommendations of this study are: Putting retrofitting as the most important part of the construction in the high risk areas. Presentation government facilities, loans and non-cash contributions for the reconstruction, improvements and retrofitting housing, and creating the crisis management centers in rural areas in each county.

Building the urban environment: visions of the organic city in the United States, Europe, and Latin America

Building the Urban Environment is a comparative study of the contestation among planners, policymakers, and the grassroots over the production and meaning of urban space. Award-winning historian Harold Platt presents case studies of seven cities, including Rotterdam, Chicago, and Sao Paulo, to show how, over time, urban life created hybrid spaces that transformed people, culture, and their environments. As Platt explains, during the post-1945 race to technological modernization, policymakers gave urban planners of the International Style extraordinary influence to build their utopian vision of a self-sustaining organic city. However, in the 1960s, they faced a revolt of the grassroots. Building the Urban Environment traces the rise and fall of the Modernist planners during an era of Cold War, urban crisis, unnatural disasters, and global restructuring in the wake of the oil-energy embargo of the '70s. Ultimately, Platt provides a way to measure different visions of the postwar city against actual results in terms of the built environment, contrasting how each city created a unique urban space.

Visual methodologies and participatory action research: Performing women’s community-based health promotion in post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACTRecovery from disaster and displacement involves multiple challenges including accompanying survivors, documenting effects, and rethreading community. This paper demonstrates how African-American and Latina community health promoters and white university-based researchers engaged visual methodologies and participatory action research (photoPAR) as resources in cross-community praxis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. Visual techniques, including but not limited to photonarratives, facilitated the health promoters’: (1) care for themselves and each other as survivors of and responders to the post-disaster context; (2) critical interrogation of New Orleans’ entrenched pre- and post-Katrina structural racism as contributing to the racialised effects of and responses to Katrina; and (3) meaning-making and performances of women’s community-based, cross-community health promotion within this post-disaster context. This feminist antiracist participatory action research project demonstrates how visual methodologies contributed to the co-researchers’ cross-community self- and other caring, critical bifocality, and collaborative construction of a contextually and culturally responsive model for women’s community-based health promotion post ‘unnatural disaster’. Selected limitations as well as the potential for future cross-community antiracist feminist photoPAR in post-disaster contexts are discussed.

Nontherapeutic areas and their role in hospital surge capacity in facing disasters.

Background:Unexpected events, accidents, wars, other natural, and unnatural disasters threaten human life. Hospitals especially emergency departments are the first line dealing with the disaster victims and on the other hand, are often full of patients. The purpose of this study is evaluating surge capacity of Isfahan Al-Zahra Hospital in facing disasters with the usage of nontherapeutic areas potential in a time of crisis.Materials and Methods:First, nontherapeutic areas having the conversional potential to be used as therapeutic areas were defined and then with applying standard formulas, and patient admission capacity was calculated.Results:After calculating, it was determined that there is a potential of hospitalization of 240 patients at the stadium next to the hospital, 100 patients in clinics, 1,000 patients in the indoor parking, and 3–4 thousand patients in the open space area.Conclusion:Hospital current capacity could be increased significantly in case of facing disasters through providing instructions, and pre-prepared plans.

Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster

Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, <i>Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster</i>

Hurricane Katrina as Unnatural Disaster: Government Failure and Inequality of Risk

Hurricane Katrina as Unnatural Disaster: Government Failure and Inequality of Risk

Austrian Contributions to the Literature on Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or manmade, disasters. Austrian economists have examined the political economy of natural disasters, disaster relief and recovery efforts, the economic effects of extended wars, post-conflict societal reconstitution, and the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. This literature advances two main findings: (1) that centralized governments are likely to be ineffective at providing the goods and services that are necessary for community recovery and (2) that decentralized efforts are better suited to address the needs of society, to discover the best course of action for producing and distributing these goods and services, and to adapt to changing needs, circumstances, and technology. This paper examines the Austrian theories utilized to examine disasters, provides a summary of the recent research on both natural and unnatural disasters, and proposes areas for future research.

Characteristics of Lusi mud volcano and its impacts on the Porong River

Since the first gas and mud volcano spewed from well at Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia (called Lusi or Lapindo mud) in 2006, its keep flowing ever since. Despite the occurrence of Lusi mud volcano was debated. Either it was natural or unnatural disaster, but maintaining the impact of the mud on social and environment is important. In addition, monitoring water, land and air quality under permitable condition is urgently necessary, due to some scientist stated that the eruption of mud volcano might be impossible to stop. The Lusi’s mud was analyzed in 2009 and showed that the concentration of heavy metals were below environmental soil quality guidelines. There were no environmental effect of heavy metals (Mn, Zn, Cu, Cr, Cd, Pb, Co, Ni, Hg, and As) resulted of mud, unless when these metals are associated with other elements. In contrast, the physical and chemical of mud-water was above the environmental standard. Continues monitoring on mud and mud-water was required to protect the environment, thus human health.

Managing unnatural disaster risk from climate extremes

Truly understanding climate-related disaster risk, and the management of that risk, can inform effective action on climate adaptation and the loss and damage mechanism, the main vehicle under the UN Climate Convention for dealing with climate-related effects, including residual impacts after adaptation.

Environmental Paradigm Shifts: Unnatural Disasters and Ethical Solutions

This essay discusses the significance of Atwood’s two cautionary speculative fiction novels Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009), within the framework of eco-politically engaged apocalyptic writing. Underlining the relevance of the comic perspective to ecological concerns, this paper proposes a new interpretation of the novels that will relate the comic mode to their apocalyptic content. This essay argues that the discourse of comic apocalypse has potential to address environmental issues directly and efficiently, insofar as it helps to build a cognitive bridge between imagining the future in the form of an imminent—and yet, presumably, improbable—catastrophe, and experiencing the present with a sense of ethical responsibility towards the world, in such a way as to prevent the catastrophe.

Industrial disasters, toxic waste, and community impacts: the health effects and environmental justice struggles around the globe

Part I. Hazardous Wastes, Theories of Industrial Disaster and Population at Risk Chapter 1: Sociology of Hazardous Wastes, Unnatural Disasters, and Health Risks Chapter 2: Hazardous and Toxic Wastes: Modern Social Problem or Plague Our Time? Chapter 3: Theories of Industrial Accidents, Disasters, and Catastrophes Chapter 4: Classification and Characterization of Hazardous Wastes Part II. Electronic Wastes, Persistent Organic Pollutants, and Health Effects Chapter 5: Electronic Waste: The Detritus of the High-Tech Revolution Chapter 6: The Hazards and Environmental Health Risks of Persistent Organic Pollutants Part III. Contaminated Communities, National and Transnational Regulatory Responses Chapter 7: Communities Contaminated by Industrial Disasters and Toxic Wastes Chapter 8: National and Transnational Regulatory Frameworks Part IV. Conclusion Chapter 9: From Local to Global Environmental Justice Movements Appendix I: Principles of Environmental Justice (PEJ)