Unnatural Disasters Research Articles

Fire and Ice: Unnatural Disasters and the Disposable Urban Poor in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

AbstractJohannesburg is a divided city where propertied middle‐class residents and the urban poor live in existentially separate worlds. If the steady accretion of luxury entertainment sites, enclosed shopping malls and gated residential communities in the northern suburbs has come to symbolize the entry of middle‐class urbanites into the culture of aspirant ‘world class’ cities, then the proliferation of overcrowded, resource‐starved informal settlements on the periurban fringe represents the dystopian features of distressed urbanism. The risk‐prone environments of informal squatter settlements magnify the impact of catastrophic events like fires and floods, and the intersection of disaster‐vulnerable settlement patterns with relaxed planning regulations and building standards, lack of preparation for unsuspected calamities, and inadequate crisis management creates entirely new artificial hazards. These unnatural disasters cannot simply be attributed to ‘bad luck’ or nature's destructive force. Disaster‐vulnerability and exposure to risk are unevenly distributed across the metropolis. By focusing attention on the catastrophic fires that regularly destroy shanty settlements in places like Alexandra township at the northeast corner of Johannesburg, it is possible to reveal a largely hidden structure of marginality and social insecurity that is a permanent condition of everyday life for the urban poor.Résumé Johannesburg est une ville divisée où habitants de la classe moyenne possédante et citadins pauvres vivent dans des univers d’existence séparés. Si l’augmentation régulière des lieux de distractions, centres commerciaux et enclaves privées sécurisées dans les banlieues Nord signe l’accès des citadins de la classe moyenne à la culture des villes candidates à‘l’échelon international’, la prolifération d’implantations sauvages surpeuplées et dépourvues de ressources à la limite périurbaine traduit les caractères dystopiques d’un urbanisme sinistré. Les environnements à risque des implantations sauvages des squatters amplifient l’impact des catastrophes telles que les incendies ou inondations, tandis que la conjonction entre modèles d’implantations à risque assortis de réglementations d’urbanisme et de normes de construction assouplies, préparation insuffisante à des calamités insoupçonnées et gestion inappropriée des crises, crée des risques artificiels totalement nouveaux. On ne peut attribuer ces désastres non naturels simplement à la malchance ou à la force destructrice de la nature. La vulnérabilité face aux catastrophes et l’exposition au risque ne se répartissent pas uniformément dans la métropole. En s’intéressant aux incendies qui ravagent régulièrement les bidonvilles existants, comme le township d’Alexandra dans la zone nord‐est de Johannesburg, on peut mettre à jour une structure quasi invisible de marginalité et d’insécurité sociale qui constitue un état permanent dans la vie quotidienne des citadins pauvres.

Unnatural Disaster

Research Article| March 01 2009 Unnatural Disaster: The Crisis of Environmental Journalism Joel Simon Joel Simon 1Joel Simon is executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He has worked as a journalist in California and Latin America and is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books, 1997). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2009) 26 (1): 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.1.87 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Joel Simon; Unnatural Disaster: The Crisis of Environmental Journalism. World Policy Journal 1 March 2009; 26 (1): 87–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.1.87 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.

Unnatural Disaster: Human Factors in the Mississippi Floods

It’s happened again. For the third time in 15 years the Mississippi River massively burst its banks this spring, inundating tiny Missouri towns such as Winfield (population 720) and Foley (population 178), causing potentially billions of dollars’ worth of destruction—although the damages are still being assessed—and hiking corn prices to $8.00 a bushel in the wake of the lost crop. On 22 April 2008 scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) measured the largest water volume on the lower Mississippi River since 1973, with a flow of 1.8 million ft3/sec, enough to fill more than 20 Olympic-size swimming pools in 1 second. The environmental fallout from the 2008 floods is still being assessed. The danger of floodwater is not simply that its level is too high, says Robert Criss, a geologist at Washington University. “Floodwaters are heavily polluted with sewage and filth, commonly bearing counts of coliforms, fecal Streptococcus, and other bacteria of many thousands per deciliter,” he explains. “The waters are laden with contaminants including agrochemicals, oils, detergents, and toxic metals. They are highly turbid, typically bearing particulate loads a hundredfold or more higher than normal river waters.” Those pollutants, contaminants, and sediments can be carried into homes, where the lingering dampness promotes mold growth. Moreover, floodwater pools trapped behind failed levees serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, flies, and other disease vectors. Meanwhile, observers are asking how such devastating floods could have occurred again so soon. The massive flooding is attributed largely to torrential spring rains in the Upper Mississippi Valley, which Paul Rydlund, a supervisory hydrologist with the USGS Missouri Water Science Center, says were even greater than those preceding the record-breaking 1993 Midwest flood. But as heavy as those rains were, the question in the minds of some is whether they were made worse by structures such as levees and other man-made interventions wrought upon the Mississippi River over time.

Differential Vulnerabilities: Environmental and Economic Inequality and Government Response to Unnatural Disasters

Robert D. Bullard Differential Vulnerabilities: Environmental and Economic Inequality and Government Response to Unnatural Disasters ON AUGUST 29, 2005, HURRICANE KATRINA MADE LANDFALL NEAR New O rleans, leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf coast counties.* Katrina was the m ost destructive hurricane in US histoiy, costing over $70 billion in insured damage. Katrina was also one of the deadliest storms in decades, w ith a death toll of 1,836, and still counting. Katrina’s death toll is surpassed only by the 1928 hurricane in Florida (estimates vary from 2,500 to 3,000 deaths) and the 8,000 w ho perished in the 1900 Galveston hurri­ cane (Kleinberg, 2003; Pastor et al„ 2006). After some two and a h alf years, reconstruction continues to move at a slow pace in New Orleans and the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf coast region. The lethargic recoveiy is now begin­ ning to overshadow the deadly storm itself (Kromm and Sturgis, 2007). Questions linger: W hat w ent wrong? Can it happen again? Is govern­ m ent equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natu­ ral and man-made disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race m atter w hen it comes to disaster relief? social research Vol 75 : No 3 : Fall 2008 753 W HY FOCUS ON THE SOUTH? This paper uses the events th at unfolded in New Orleans, the Gulf coast region, and the southern United States as the sociohistorical backdrop for examining social vulnerability and governm ent response to unnatu­ ral disasters. The case studies of disparate treatm ent date back m ore than eight decades. The South is unique because of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and entrenched w hite supremacy. The region has a history of black business ownership, black hom e ownership, and black land ownership. Most black farmers are located in the South. It is no accident that the South gave birth to the m odem civil rights move­ m ent and the environm ental justice movement. And the vast m ajority (over 95 percent) of the 105 historically black colleges and universities are located in the South. The 2000 census show ed th at African Am ericans ended the century by returning “hom e” to the South—the same region they spent m ost of the century escaping. Since the mid-seventies, reverse m igra­ tion patterns indicate th at m ore blacks are entering the South than leaving for other regions. Today, over 54 percent of the nation’s blacks live in the South (McKinnon, 2000). In the 620 counties that m ake up the southern “blackbelt,” stretching from Delaware to Texas, African Americans comprise a larger percentage of the total population than they do in the country as a whole—about 12 percent. In the 15 southern states (excluding Texas and Florida), blacks make up 22.8 percent of the population, compared w ith 3.5 percent for Hispanics. Transportation serves as a key com ponent in addressing poverty, unem ploym ent, and equal opportunity goals, ensuring access to educa­ tion, health care, and other public services. American society is largely divided between individuals w ith cars and those w ithout cars (Bullard and Johnson, 1997). The private automobile is still the dom inant travel mode of every segm ent of the American population, including the poor and people of color. Nationally, only 7 percent of white households do not own a car, compared w ith 24 percent of African-American households, 17 percent 754 social research of Latino households, and 13 percent of Asian-American households. Cars are an essential part of emergency evacuation plans. Disaster evac­ uation plans across the nation assume that people own a car. Nearly 11 million households in the United States lack vehicles, or more than 28 million Americans who would have difficulty evacuating their area in an emergency. In 1997, to encourage b etter disaster planning, the Federal Emergency M anagem ent Agency (FEMA) launched Project Impact, a pilot program that provided funding for com m unities to assess their vulnerable populations and make arrangem ents to get people w...

Design, Development, and Deployment of a Rapid Universal Safety and Health System for Construction

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important as customers demand better project management performance and globally, as countries plan for and respond to the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a rapid universal safety and health system (RUSH) was designed, developed, deployed, and evaluated. For its inaugural application, the RUSH was applied to a 106-hour construction project. Results from an initial application included a safe build in approximately 5 days without recordable incidents. More importantly, lessons were learned by a multidisciplinary team of researchers who observed safety 24/5 for the life of the project. Lessons learned and recommendations for future research are provided as a result of this experience.

Queering the Disaster: A Presidential Session

The 2007 SANA meetings on “Unnatural Disasters” used Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath as the focus of its scheduled sessions, and for scholarly and activist reflection on this theme. As the planning for the conference unfolded, we recognized that a very important component of the Katrina experience, related to our own work in North American anthropology, needed to be part of the conference program. New Orleans is a city with a long‐standing queer counter‐culture, many of whose participants are black and many of whom were hardest hit by the hurricane and flooding. We organized a session “Queering the Disaster,” designed to document the queer presence in the Katrina experience, and, thereby draw attention to the need to include attention to marginal sexualities in anthropological studies of unnatural disasters

Two kinds of truth: stories and reportage from China

Editor's Note An Interview with Liu Binyan Perry Link Part I. Speech to the Congress of Literature and Art Workers Listen Carefully to the Voice of the People Translated by Kyna Rubin Part II. Reportage People or Monsters? Translated by James V. Feinerman Sound Is Better than Silence Translated by Michael S. Duke The Second Kind of Loyalty Translated By Richard W. Bodman Report on a Void Investigation Translated by Perry Link Part III. Fiction Warning Translated by Madelyn Ross The Fifth Man in the Overcoat Translated by John S. Rohsenow Part IV. Review Essays An Unnatural Disaster Translated by Perry Link A Great Leap Backward? Translated by Perry Link Contributors

Mississippi River Stories: Lessons from a Century of Unnatural Disasters

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the nation pondered how a relatively weak Category 3 storm could have destroyed an entire region. Few appreciated the extent to which a flawed federal water development policy transformed this apparently natural disaster into a manmade disaster; fewer still appreciated how the disaster was the predictable, and indeed predicted, sequel to almost a century of similar disasters. This article focuses upon three such stories: the Great Flood of 1927, the Midwest Flood of 1993, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005. Taken together, the stories reveal important lessons, including the inadequacy of engineered flood control structures such as levees and dams; the perverse incentives created by the national flood insurance program; and the need to reform federal leadership over flood hazard control, particularly as delegated to the Army Corps of Engineers.Setting forth what we call the theory of double takes, this article argues that property owners in flood-prone areas take taxpayer dollars through two sometimes-overlapping mechanisms. First, a package of subsidies - including flood control structures, federal flood insurance, and after-the-fact disaster relief - enables and even encourages construction in high-risk areas. Second, landowners denied permits to develop floodplain and coastal property can take federal dollars in the form of compensation awarded under the Fifth Amendment. Such claims for compensation are fostered by the 1992 decision, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, in which the Supreme Court endorsed the view that coastal areas are valueless in their natural state - a dangerous misconception laid bare by the post-Katrina awareness that wetlands and barrier islands instead perform an invaluable flood-taming function. We conclude with suggestions for reform of federal flood hazard policy, the national flood insurance program, and the regulatory takings doctrine.

In Katrina's wake: portraits of loss from an unnatural disaster

In Katrina's wake: portraits of loss from an unnatural disaster

Geographies of Care and Responsibility

Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care from view. Geographers are well positioned to draw attention to these trends and I urge us to think about our responsibility to care about these issues, and the geographies that they make. I ask us all to think about our responsibilities as geographers to pose questions in the face of (i) market extensions, (ii) currently pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.), and (iii) the withdrawal of public support from many crucial arenas. Care ethics focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. I consider how our research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics. Care ethics suggests that we build spatially extensive connections of interdependence and mutuality, that we attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction), and that we take up social responsibility in our professional practices. Nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life… —(Kingsolver 2002)

Social Vulnerabilities and Hurricane Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster in New Orleans

Social science research on natural disasters documents how a natural hazard such as a hurricane becomes a disaster through social processes and social structures that place human populations in general, and certain segments in particular, at risk. After a description of Hurricane Katrina and its impact, we describe how patterns of land development, and the economic and political history of New Orleans, set the stage for this disaster. An overview of past research findings on the relationship between citizen vulnerability and poverty, minority status, age and disability, gender and tenancy is followed by evidence of the extent to which each risk factor was present in the pre-Katrina New Orleans population. The authors then cite evidence of how social vulnerability influenced outcomes at various stages of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, including mitigation, preparation, evacuation, storm impacts, and recovery. The concluding section discusses how the goal of disaster resilient communities cannot be reached until basic issues of inequality and social justice are addressed.

Formative Evaluation of a Rapid Universal Safety and Health (RUSH) System for Construction

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important in the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a Rapid Universal Safety and Health system (RUSH) was designed, developed and deployed. For its inaugural application, the RUSH was applied to a 106 hour residential construction project. This paper presents the formative evaluation based upon on-site data collection and a survey instruments administered just after the project to trades, managers and safety team members. No major incidents were recorded. The results will be discussed in terms of the observational and survey results.

Contemporary issues in humanitarianism: selected resources

As Tony Vaux points out in his Guest Editorial in this issue, the concept of humanitarianism applies to both war and general disaster, and is based on the principle that ‘in extreme cases of human suffering external agents may offer assistance to people in need, and in doing so should be accorded respect and even “rights” in carrying out their functions’. However, policy makers in humanitarian agencies, and aid workers on the ground, face a bewilderingly complex set of challenges in determining such ‘rights’. Gone are any comfortable certainties about what in the commercial sector is known as ‘the licence to operate’, and claims to the moral high ground of ‘neutrality’ have an increasingly hollow ring. Perhaps more to the point, such assumptions are of little practical use to frontline workers who may risk ambush, abduction, deportation, or even their lives as the result of their professional activities. Nor do outdated road maps help relief agencies to orient their decisions on whether to withdraw or continue providing material assistance in the knowledge that a proportion of it is fuelling the violence or lining the pockets of conflict profiteers. There are no standard ‘off-the-peg’ answers, because each situation must be considered on its own merits. And of course no aid agencies share an identical mandate, or have precisely the same expertise or history of involvement with the affected population – all factors that must be weighed up in deciding what is the appropriate course of action. For reasons of space, we have not sought to cover the areas of early warning, prevention, and mitigation associated with ‘natural’ disasters, although of course the two are always linked, as became very clear in wake of the Asian tsunami in Aceh and Sri Lanka. It has long been recognised that since catastrophic events disproportionately affect the poor and marginalised, they expose and may intensify existing social divides and structural injustice. For instance, in his seminal work on the 1943 Bengal famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (OUP, 1984) Amartya K Sen argued that such food shortages do not occur in functioning democracies. Similarly, Roger Plant's, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster (Latin America Bureau, 1978) showed how the 1974 earthquake triggered an intensification in state violence that was to result in the death or disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans and create ‘a nation of widows and orphans’. In accordance with the focus of this issue, we have given priority to publications and organisations that reflect on some direct involvement in humanitarian endeavour, rather than giving priority to more policy-oriented or scholarly works or academic institutions. We have included literature on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, since this was such a defining event for humanitarianism; and some recent publications concerning the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 (‘Operation Enduring Freedom’) and Iraq in March 2003 (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), since these have significantly redefined the global landscape of policy and practice within which humanitarian agencies operate. Inevitably we can offer only a glimpse of the growing literature in these fields, but we hope in so doing that readers, and particularly those directly involved in humanitarian endeavours, will be encouraged to explore the issues further.

Katrina's Unnatural Disaster A Tragedy of Black Suffering and White Denial

The “unnatural disaster” of Hurricane Katrina is examined in the context of American structural racism. The Bush administration's lack of response in providing aid to the city of New Orleans and the public spectacle of Black anguish is a “civic ritual” that reconfirms the racial hierarchy of the United States. The denial by white America of the reality of Black suffering is essential to the preservation of white hegemony.

What Makes a Disaster “Natural”?

Natural disasters differ from unnatural disasters not so much in their causes or in their effects but primarily in our reaction to them. In natural disasters nature plays the role of a catalyst. Yet nature does not provide a convenient enemy to rally against and attack in retribution. This in part explains why, unlike the social and political unity that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, violence and political turmoil ensued in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Natural and Unnatural Disasters

Unnatural Disasters: Case Studies of Human-Induced Environmental Catastrophes

Angus M. Gunn Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. 143 pp. ISBN: 0-313-31999-5, $55 cloth. This book was written as a sequel to an earlier volume by the same author on the impact of natural disasters, The Impact of Geology on the United States: A Reference Guide to Benefits and Hazards (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). In this second volume, Angus M. Gunn provides an overview of human-made environmental disasters. He shows that although technology has given humankind enormous control over the environment, it has also proven to be a threat to our survival. Gunn categorizes these human-made disasters into a number of subtypes—for example, mining disasters, dam failures, government actions, industrial explosions, oil spills, nuclear energy catastrophes, and terrorism. For each of these types of disaster, the book contains 26 case examples describing the events that led up to the disaster, the technical details of the event itself, the cleanup it necessitated, and its consequences. Some of the examples described in the book are famous—for example, the Minimata mercury poisoning in Japan, the Buffalo Creek dam collapse in West Virginia, and the near accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Others have been almost forgotten, such as the deliberately induced great famine in Ukraine in 1932, which resulted from the massive collectivization of farms ordered by Stalin. The book is well written and successfully combines factual information with good journalism. Gunn professes to stick to the tried-and-true methods of the hard physical sciences. The consequence of this choice is that the book makes no reference to the societal and psychological impacts of disasters. Interestingly, it is exactly some of the case examples given in the book, such as the Three Mile Island incident, that have led to the recognition of the importance of these secondary effects. This omission is especially obvious in the case of terrorist events, which are precisely intended to cause fear and social discord as much as physical damage. Readers who are interested in the full picture of the impact of human-made disasters, including their underlying psychological and societal dynamics, should therefore turn to other volumes (e.g., Havenaar JM, Cwikel JG, Bromet EJ, eds. Toxic Turmoil: Psychological and Societal Consequences of Ecological Disasters. New York:Kluwer Academic, 2002). Another shortcoming of the book is that some of the medical information cited in the book appears to be incorrect, as presented in the case of the Chernobyl accident. Without due reference the author states that this accident caused a steady rise in miscarriages and birth defects in Belarus and will eventually have generated a death toll of over 5 million people. Claims such as these are entirely unfounded, as noted by Bard et al. [Chernobyl, 10 years after: health consequences. Am J Epidemiol 19:1–18 (1997)]. In summary, Unnatural Disasters is a well-written book containing a wealth of historical details about some classical environmental disasters, but it is not suitable as a reference for public health purposes.

Unnatural disasters: case studies of human-induced environmental catastrophes

This reference resource describes both the scientific background and the economic and social issues that resulted from environmental disasters resulting primarily from human activity. Categorized by the type of tragedy-including coal mine tragedies, dam failures, industrial explosions, and oil spills-this one-stop guide provides students with descriptions of some of the world's most tragic environmental disasters. Entries clearly describe each disaster by defining the cause, the consequences, and the clean-up efforts. Readers will learn who the responsible parties were, the effect on the environment and people living in the immediate area, and the economic impact of each disaster. In addition, the long-term consequences, the likelihood of a repeat disaster in the same area, and the measures that have been taken to prevent a repeat incident are discussed. Entries include the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.