Wake Of Disaster Research Articles

‘Terremoto: Utopia, memory, and the unfinished in Sicily’

This article details the destruction of the original town of Gibellina in Western Sicily in January 1968, and its subsequent memorialization in Alberto Burri's vast land art sculpture/installation, Il Grande Cretto (‘The Great Crack’), constructed in the 1980s. Conceived as a ‘labyrinth of memory’, Burri's work covered the old town in a concrete shroud; however it was never fully finished and is now in a state of disrepair. The text reflects on concrete as dynamic, ambivalent material, and on the status of the artwork as a memorial. It also explores the town's relocation and reconstruction in the 1980s as a utopian art-and-garden community 18 km west of the original site, designed by renowned architects, artists and town planners. Today Nuova Gibellina, an open-air urban gallery in the shape of a butterfly, remains unfinished and is in part deserted: a ‘new ruin’ of a radical urban environment, described by one Italian commentator as ‘the cemetery of the avant-garde’. The article explores the current urban fabric and architecture of this ‘concrete utopia’ as material trace of an adventurous and compromised endeavor to realize an ideal of cultural renewal in the wake of disaster, and affirms its status as unfinished ‘work-in-progress’.

Identification and prioritization of coordination barriers in humanitarian supply chain management

In the wake of disaster, several organizations work for the welfare of the disaster victims, although lack of coordination among them hampers the performance of relief operations. This study sets out to explore and prioritize the coordination barriers in the humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM), particularly in the Indian context to enhance the performance of relief operations. The study is divided into three phases. Initially, barriers to coordination were identified through an extensive literature review, allied to brainstorming sessions with experts. These were then grouped into 5 categories, i.e. management barriers, technological barriers, cultural barriers, people barriers and organizational barriers. Secondly, a survey questionnaire was designed, tested and refined to incorporate the views of the managers involved in the relief operations of the disaster that occurred in the Uttarakhand (a Northern state in India) on June 14, 2013 in order to empirically verify the barriers to coordination. Finally, barriers were prioritized on the basis of their severity using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) which considers the uncertainty of the data and impreciseness rather than crisp value. The results indicate that lack of top management commitment, improper organizational structure to create and share knowledge and lack of policy for coordination are the major barriers. These are the areas that need to be handled first in order to remove coordination barriers. The findings of the study throw some new light on the coordination issues in HSCM and provide a more effective, efficient, robust and systematic way to overcome coordination barriers.

Claiming the Past: History, Memory, and Innovation Following the Christmas Flood of 1717

The Christmas Flood of 1717 affected much of the North Sea coastline between Denmark and the northern Netherlands and was one of the greatest disasters of the early modern era. This article investigates the impact of the flood in the northern Dutch province of Groningen and makes three interrelated claims. First, the flood showcased the contested nature of flood interpretation and adaptive decision making in the wake of disaster. Second, dialogues of conflict that developed in the aftermath of the flood focused on three issues: the divine causation of flooding, the financing of dike management, and the viability of technocratic solutions to flood risk. Third, the ultimate goal of much of the flood literature was to promote prescribed action but also to enshrine the motivations for those beliefs in legal precedent, history, and cultural memory. Rather than being defined by either cumulative experience or the shock of catastrophe, the Groninger response is a case study in the importance of both. This balance resulted in a dialogue that stressed continuity and convention while simultaneously facilitating technological innovation.

The Use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Post-Disaster Psychotherapy

Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, propelling serious emotional, financial, and practical problems at millions of people. Many of them experienced ongoing feelings of stress and anxiety following the disaster. 22 individuals with anxiety issues post-disaster were treated with Dialectical Behavior Therapy techniques, and compared to control subjects who received no treatment. The Beck Anxiety Inventory was administered to assess anxiety levels pre and posttreatment. Results indicated that Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is useful in reducing anxiety levels triggered by natural disaster. This study substantiates earlier studies which demonstrate the effectiveness of DBT, and provides new data on its use with a new sample: post-hurricane survivors. Discovering techniques which can support emotional recovery is useful for individuals, communities, and relief organizations which establish policies and programs. Practical implications of this research include the need for resources to help survivors cope with emotional issues in the wake of disasters. This study yields significant information which can assist survivors of future natural disasters.

Risk and responsibility The Social Roots of Risk Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience Kathleen Tierney Stanford Business Books, 2014. 317 pp.

Risk and responsibility <b>The Social Roots of Risk Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience</b> <i>Kathleen Tierney</i> Stanford Business Books, 2014. 317 pp.

The development of a model of psychological first aid for non-mental health trained public health personnel: the Johns Hopkins RAPID-PFA.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, which houses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center, has been addressing the challenge of disaster-caused behavioral health surge by conducting training programs in psychological first aid (PFA) for public health professionals. This report describes our approach, named RAPID-PFA, and summarizes training evaluation data to determine if relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes are imparted to trainees to support effective PFA delivery. In the wake of disasters, there is an increase in psychological distress and dysfunction among survivors and first responders. To meet the challenges posed by this surge, a professional workforce trained in PFA is imperative. More than 1500 participants received a 1-day RAPID-PFA training. Pre-/postassessments were conducted to measure (a) required knowledge to apply PFA; (b) perceived self-efficacy, that is, belief in one's own ability, to apply PFA techniques; and (c) confidence in one's own resilience in a crisis context. Statistical techniques were used to validate the extent to which the survey successfully measured individual PFA constructs, that is, unidimensionality, and to quantify the reliability of the assessment tool. Statistically significant pre-/postimprovements were observed in (a) knowledge items supportive of PFA delivery, (b) perceived self-efficacy to apply PFA interventions, and (c) confidence about being a resilient PFA provider. Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from 0.87 to 0.90 suggested that the self-reported measures possessed sufficient internal consistency. Findings were consistent with our pilot work, and with our complementary research initiatives validating a variant of RAPID-PFA with faith communities. The RAPID-PFA model promises to be a broadly applicable approach to extending community behavioral health surge capacity. Relevant next steps include evaluating the effectiveness of trained providers in real crisis situations, and determining if PFA training may have potential beyond the disaster context.

The Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun

While the initial literary and cultural response to 9/11 consisted mostly of domestic narratives of trauma and mourning that avoided explicit political discourse, narrative representations of Hurricane Katrina, from the beginning, have been highly political. This is a profound, if simplistic, inversion: an act of political violence is de-politicized by its cultural response, while a natural disaster is overtly politicized. While the politicization of Hurricane Katrina is clearly, in part, down to the many accusations of negligence and racism that were immediately leveled at the American government after the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, this article argues that a major politicizing factor is and was the de-politicization of 9/11. Many narratives of Hurricane Katrina, therefore, are loaded with an aggregation of dissent and political discourse that relates not just to Katrina but also to 9/11 and the War on Terror. This article focuses specifically on Dave Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina, Zeitoun (2009) and the way it responds to the domestication of 9/11 in these early instances of 9/11 fiction, and, in particular Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). It argues that Zeitoun responds to The Road’s conservative, messianic allegory, its retrograde formulation of frontier masculinity and unlikely recourse to the domestic. Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina is also a migrant story and it is able to both dramatize the social realities of the War on Terror and build a surprising and affecting narrative of community and pluralism in the wake of disaster. Ultimately, this comparative analysis illuminates a wider and revealing departure from the cultural representation of 9/11 in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina where texts like Zeitoun, are overtly political and loaded with the weight of two catastrophes.

Powering Through the Storm: Microgrids Operation for More Efficient Disaster Recovery

Disasters, whether natural or man-made, compromise the quality of life for all involved. In such situations, expeditious recovery activities are deemed imperative and irreplaceable for the restoration of normalcy. However, recovery activities rely heavily on the critical infrastructures that supply basic needs like electricity, water, information, and transportation. When disasters strike, it is likely that the critical infrastructures themselves are affected significantly, hampering efficient recovery processes, thus presenting a Catch-22 conundrum. In this article, we present examples from different parts of the world where distributed energy resources, organized in a microgrid, were used to provide reliable electricity supply in the wake of disasters, allowing recovery and rebuilding efforts to occur with relatively greater efficiency.

Gratitude and personal functioning among earthquake survivors in Indonesia

This study examined the potential role of gratitude as a protective factor against posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptomatology and global distress (GD) in the wake of disasters. Using longitudinal methodology, we assessed positive coping, gratitude, PTS symptomatology, and GD among 310 survivors of the 2009 Padang earthquake in Indonesia five and eight months after the disaster. Psychological hardiness and neuroticism were also measured at baseline. A general prototype model was constructed to predict scores on each of the dependent variables (GD and PTS symptomatology) at both time points. Hardiness and neuroticism were associated with GD and PTS at Time 1, but gratitude and positive coping had concurrent associations with these variables at Time 2. The unique association between gratitude and impairment at Time 2 suggests that it may play a role in adjustment to extreme disaster, but that it takes time to do so.

Experts under the microscope: the Wivenhoe Dam case

Prosecution of experts in the wake of disasters has emerged as common in the context of increasing social intolerance of risk. This paper examines expert blame using as a case study the decisions of engineers who operated Wivenhoe Dam during the Queensland floods in January 2011 and the criticisms of those decisions by the subsequent Commission of Inquiry. Our analysis draws on the literature on organisational safety, organisational learning and expertise to examine the relevance of the criteria against which the engineers were judged, the relevant competence of those who made this assessment and the broader implications of such exercises. Our analysis shows that lay judgements of expert practice can be misleading, as evidenced by the Commission of Inquiry’s misguided focus on procedural adherence. We argue that such inquiries—where the focus is on assigning blame—detract from opportunities to learn from incidents and can negatively impact on professional practices. If the aim is to make future disasters less likely, then inquiries that take this approach may be failing in this endeavour, or at least not maximising their contribution.

Emergency online schools as a means of providing schooling and crisis support after school closings due to catastrophic disasters

Children are particularly vulnerable to disasters. As schools are an integral part of most communities, continuance of a school routine after a disaster is perceived by children as a sign of resiliency. Furthermore, schools also provide an avenue to supply recovery related support to children. However, contemporary crisis preparation models do not adequately address how children will continue their education and how educators and school mental health professionals will appropriately serve children when schools are destroyed after a disaster. One way to sustain school operations in the wake of disasters is through emergency online schools. Optimally, emergency online schools can offer immediate, sustained schooling and support services after a catastrophic disaster when the event makes it impossible for school buildings to operate. This paper examines the viability of and resources necessary for constructing and implementing emergency online schools with an eye toward broad socioeconomic and geographic application. Implications and future directions also are presented.

When Disaster Strikes Our Local Communities: U.S. EMDR Trauma Recovery Network Coordinators Reflect on Lessons Learned

As a result of a dramatic surge of community-wide traumatic events over the last years, we have seen an increase in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)-trained clinicians in the United States who want to volunteer as responders to their own or neighboring communities in the wake of disaster. This grassroots movement was followed by the Trauma Recovery/Humanitarian Assistance Program’s (TR/HAP) development of an organizational structure for Trauma Recovery Networks (TRNs) to provide EMDR training and treatment in their own local, affected areas. The personal stories of disaster response interventions by TRNs in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and New York City in 2012–2013 are examples of two decades of HAP team “experiences along the way.” Lessons learned from the inside out are shared to encourage other developing networks in the logistical, emotional, and spiritual preparation for community disaster work. With the unfolding of TR/HAP’s development of a National Trauma Recovery Network, there is an opportunity to ensure efficient and effective disaster responses by properly trained and prepared local EMDR clinicians. TRN chapters and their teams continue to increase awareness in local communities of the healing possibilities of acute and longer term trauma symptoms through early intervention with EMDR treatment.

Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism

Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Melanie Dawson Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism In her recent book, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet, Elizabeth Ammons describes her investment in environmental literature, a subject matter that is appealing to her in part because of its roots in what she casts as tangible realities. Ammons positions ecocritical work as a corrective to her perception of academic abstraction. Creating contrasts between environmental writing and a literary emphasis on what she terms the “‘inexpressibility’ of language,” Ammons views the former as privileging real-world consequences that ground the text and, with it, the discipline of literary study.1 While I understand the intersection of world and text in somewhat different ways and have no wish to suggest that ecological criticism is valuable because of its referentiality alone, there is in ecofeminist writing a real-world application that helps students both probe literary texts and confront theoretical complexity in ways that are enhanced by the kinds of tangible realities Ammons highlights. Powerfully organizing the ways that students imagine their personal and collective pasts as well as their material, corporeal, and familial futures, environmental writing offers various avenues through which to address feminist concerns—those situated in the colonial past, the present day, or the 1. Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010), 5. 334 Melanie Dawson dystopian future. From global climate change to rising food prices and ethical approaches to the consumption of fuel, food, and imports of all kinds, environmentally sensitive literature confronts a host of social, economic, and gendered consequences. Like Ammons, I am a specialist in late nineteenth- and early twentieth -century US fiction who, like many teaching in this era, encourages students to interrogate fiction in light of historical contexts. I view environmentally oriented writing as approachable through mechanisms very similar to the historically saturated approaches to literature that have supplied the grounding of many scholars who were educated in the 1990s and beyond. Environmental concerns offer unique opportunities to explore fiction in light of historicized narratives of land use; they also encourage readers to investigate the consequences of alterations to the natural world, which are now proceeding at an unprecedented rate of speed. The genetic modification of edible plants, for example, as well as species depletion, weather-related disasters, and massive oil spills can be invoked to argue that it is precisely the time to historicize the present and to imagine the tangible consequences of environmental change in the making. Many of the texts I teach in my Feminism and the Environment course (taught at the undergraduate level in the English department and cross-listed with the women’s studies program) posit that at moments of historic rupture and cataclysmic disaster, social structures alter so as to limit women’s access to resources and power. Linking domination of the environment to the domination of women (a connection that ecofeminist theory helps elucidate for students), fictions such as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) urge readers to recognize the ideological components of responses to environmental change. Alongside other readings in the class, these fictions imply that environmental change can be used to justify hierarchies of gender as well as class and race in the service of reasserting order in the wake of disaster. Invested as such fictions are in the conditions that alter social structures, they assert that “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land” can be used to consolidate and intensify forms of political and social control , as in Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games, with which I began my class in fall 2012. As the quotation above suggests, the damaged and shrinking land mass of North America brought about a “brutal Melanie Dawson 335 war for what little sustenance remained” and led to victory on the part of Panem, the repressive state that stages a brutal spectacle of its domination over the nation’s youth.2 In exploring what ecofeminists recognize as interwoven...

Race, Poverty, and Policy in the Wake of Disaster: Post‐Katrina Views

Hurricane Katrina has produced a substantial body of literature. Here, I examine one of the first and most widely read books on the social consequences and implications of the storm by Michael Eric Dyson, and then look at some of the most recently published volumes on this topic. In general, the authors ask good questions and sometimes even have good answers, but there are also many important questions that they do not ask. From the perspective of inequality, the perspective that dominates the works discussed in this essay, the demographics of pre-Katrina New Orleans showed a place of striking differences in opportunity and advantage, especially on racial grounds. In 2000, over two-thirds of the people in the city were African American, but African Americans constituted 82% of the city’s poor. Children were disproportionately represented among the poor and among the city’s majority black population. One-third of the black residents were younger than 18 years of age, compared to only 14% of the smaller white group, and an estimated 94% of poor children in New Orleans were African American. While there were certainly low-income whites and wealthy African Americans in the Crescent City, the group-level income gaps were striking. New Orleans whites in 2000 had a median family income of $46,600 and a median household income of $52,500. The black median family and household incomes were half of those: $23,300 and $25,750, respectively (Ruggles et al. 2010). Behind these stark

Climate Change and Civil Unrest

This article examines the destabilizing impact of rapid-onset, climate-related disasters. It uses a sample of storms and floods in conjunction with two intensity measures of civil unrest to examine two perspectives on human reactions to disasters (conflictual, cooperative). It also uses insights from the contentious politics literature to understand how emotions posited by the conflictual perspective are transformed into destabilizing acts. While the data show that mean levels of unrest are higher in the wake of disasters, the means poorly reflect the data: the vast majority of episodes do not show higher levels of unrest. Moreover, even when higher levels of unrest emerge, they are not a simple reflection of disaster's human impact; this underscores the importance of the transformational process. Thus, a preliminary model of political violence is investigated; it employs impact, process and institutional variables and it explains three-quarters of the variance in the intensity of violence.

Disowning Fukushima: Managing the credibility of nuclear reliability assessment in the wake of disaster

AbstractThis paper reflects on the credibility of nuclear risk assessment in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns. In democratic states, policymaking around nuclear energy has long been premised on an understanding that experts can objectively and accurately calculate the probability of catastrophic accidents. Yet the Fukushima disaster lends credence to the substantial body of social science research that suggests such calculations are fundamentally unworkable. Nevertheless, the credibility of these assessments appears to have survived the disaster, just as it has resisted the evidence of previous nuclear accidents. This paper looks at why. It argues that public narratives of the Fukushima disaster invariably frame it in ways that allow risk‐assessment experts to “disown” it. It concludes that although these narratives are both rhetorically compelling and highly consequential to the governance of nuclear power, they are not entirely credible.

Emergency and disaster readiness must consider unique needs of children

With the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and the unimaginable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School still painfully fresh, the Commentary by Lurie and Kahn, published in this issue of The Journal, takes on special poignancy and urgency. The “take-home” message of this Commentary? Emergency and disaster readiness are important public health concerns. Until recently, efforts to promote preparedness for both natural and “man-made” disasters, and more recently, terrorism, typically were not targeted to address the specific needs of special populations, such as children. This Commentary demonstrates how the creation of awareness (through advocacy and education) within key Federal departments and agencies can result in productive collaboration between the public (government, public health) and private (hospitals, physician groups) sectors towards improving our readiness for the unique needs of children. The authors make a compelling case not only to consider the needs of children as survivors, but how youth can be empowered to be part of a whole community response. Article page 274▶ Ensuring the Health Security of America's ChildrenThe Journal of PediatricsVol. 163Issue 1PreviewThe US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has made ensuring the safety and well-being of the nation's children in the wake of disasters and public health emergencies a priority. More than one-quarter of the US population is younger than 20 years of age,1 and addressing the unique physiologic and developmental needs of children must be an explicit part of preparedness and response activities. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Commission on Children and Disasters (2008-2011) have advocated for comprehensive planning and policies regarding emergency preparedness for children. Full-Text PDF

Social Capital and the Future of Disaster Recovery Research

AbstractDaniel P. Aldrich's Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post‐Disaster Recovery (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a major addition to the study of how societies recover in the wake of natural disasters. In this book, Aldrich challenges conventional claims that successful reconstruction from natural disasters is about the quality of governance, sufficient funding, extent of physical damage, or levels of human capital. Instead, he points to social capital as a crucial determinant of a society's post‐disaster recovery over the medium to longer term. The book also raises important issues as to how we might think about the independence of observations in the wake of disaster, the concepts of bridging and social capital, how to fruitfully integrate societal‐based accounts of post‐disaster with state‐based accounts, and about moving toward more systematic comparisons not only within but also across different disasters.

Book Review: Mulligan, Martin and Nadarajah, Yaso, Rebuilding Communities in the Wake of Disaster: Social Recovery in Sri Lanka and India

Mulligan, Martin and Nadarajah, Yaso, Rebuilding Communities in the Wake of Disaster: Social Recovery in Sri Lanka and India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012). Pp. 231.

Ensuring the Health Security of America's Children

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has made ensuring the safety and well-being of the nation's children in the wake of disasters and public health emergencies a priority. More than one-quarter of the US population is younger than 20 years of age,1 and addressing the unique physiologic and developmental needs of children must be an explicit part of preparedness and response activities. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Commission on Children and Disasters (2008-2011) have advocated for comprehensive planning and policies regarding emergency preparedness for children.