Why was this blog created?

This blog was established in the days after the Haiti earthquake, and will likely focus on this disaster for the near future, but I would like this to be a repository for all manner of information on disasters, hazards, risk, and related matters. The amount of information here will ebb and flow with the salience of disasters and policy and research agendas. If you would like to be a contributing author, let me know!

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Kathleen Tierney compares the Haiti Earthquake with Katrina

Kathleen Tierney, a sociologist and internationally known expert on disasters, provided a commentary on CNN that describes how the Haiti earthquake was proportionately more catastrophic for Haiti than was Hurricane Hugo for the United States as a whole.
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1 comment:

  1. Dave NealJanuary 17, 2010 at 8:53 AM

    To build upon KT's theme, it really strikes me that the media are taking the "car accident" approach to reporting, and not really getting the large scope of this event. The human interest stories are fine, but in actuality there are thousands of such stories. They just don't know how to approach the large broad scope of this occasion.

    And to punctuate the idea that this event is not a disaster but a catastrophe, in such large scale catastrophic events, there are no SOPs - we all have to be creative. We know what the key goals are, the issue is how to we accomplish those goals. Business as usual will not (and is not)working.

    I suspect in a few weeks, we will be hearing how "command and control" and ICS saved the day. But since they really did not (or could not) work during Katrina, how could such bureaucratic configurations work in Haiti?

    In short, this is an event quiet large in scope. It is not a car accident (every day event), not a F2 Hurricane (disaster), this is a large scape catastrophe. We have to respond (and recover)with this in mind. If we don't learn this lesson now, when a catastrophic event hits the USA (yes, one larger than Katrina), our respnose will be slow, and lives will be lost.

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