By Kristopher Thornburg Suggested Citation Thornburg, Kristopher. Review of Out of the Whirlwind: Supply and Demand After Hurricane Maria, by Philip Palin. Homeland Security Affairs 15, Article 7. www.hsaj.org/articles/15492 The 2017 hurricane season left wide swaths of destruction across parts of the southern United States. Puerto Rico was hit the hardest, beginning with a glancing…
Posts Tagged with Disaster Response
Building Community Capacity and Resilience through Improvements in Economic Recovery
Kevin McMahan EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Disasters in the form of weather patterns, earthquakes, and human-made catastrophes have become more frequent and severe in recent years. These events have a direct economic impact on communities. The losses incurred, in both the short and long term, can overwhelm a community long after the disaster subsides. For example, in…
Disruptive Emergent Systems in Disaster Response
Kristopher Thornburg EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The 2017 hurricanes in the southern United States provided an impetus for wider social technology use than during previous disaster responses. Hurricane survivors rapidly turned to social media for help while physically unaffected social media users crowdsourced crisis maps to generate complex and powerful emergent information systems. Volunteers unaffiliated with first…
The God Protocol: In Search of a Common Ethical Approach to Disaster Response
Eric Soucie Executive Summary Domestic disaster relief in the United States has undergone various changes in terms of public expectations, legal authorities, and operational approaches over the last several decades. Some have argued that this trend has gone too far while others argue it has not gone far enough in placing a particular burden,…
A Model of Creating Inpatient Hospital Surge Capacity through Early Discharge
William Dunne EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Disasters and catastrophic mass casualty incidents continue to occur in the United States and around the globe. These events challenge their communities to preserve life and often require responders to go to extraordinary measure and utilize austere conditions to fight injury, illness, and disease. These communities are often stressed to prioritize…
Application of the Intelligence Cycle to Prevent Impacts of Disastrous Wildland Fires
Brian Young EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The threat of wildland fires is an issue of national security, as it relates to disaster management and the protection of U.S. citizens. Numerous wildfires, burned homes, environmental consequences, and the evacuation of thousands are problems that occur nearly every fire season. Tactical considerations are the primary focus of how the…
Inclusion of Disaster Resiliency In City/Neighborhood Comprehensive Plans
Douglas Gavin EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Urban planning professionals and FEMA encourage the inclusion of hazard mitigation in the urban planning process. Comprehensive plans are a tool that planners create to strategize for the future of a community and/or city and to determine how the land and its citizens will interact within the community’s spaces. To better…
Disaster Threat and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Jeffrey Siems EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Decision making is a cognitive process of selecting a course of action or belief among multiple alternative choices. Each decision results in a sequence of behaviors or activities the decider deems satisfactory, beneficial, or in her or his best interest.[1] However, disasters can create chaos, wickedness, and pressures of time or…
Developing a Shared Service Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Capability for Regional Emergency Services
Thomas Lakamp EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have evolved over the last century from rudimentary tethered balloons to electronically advanced aircraft that can be piloted using a cellular telephone. As a result of this evolution, the UAV has found its way into the field of emergency services and has proven itself as an advantageous…
Lessons From Fukushima: Relocation and Recovery from Nuclear Catastrophe
Gerilee Wohlschlegel Bennett EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Nana korobi ya oki—Fall seven times, stand up eight. —Japanese proverb INTRODUCTION Four years later, Japan is still struggling to recover from the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdown that struck March 11, 2011. Any one of these disasters would have challenged seasoned leaders with a well-designed…