Author Archives: recoverydiva

“Ten Indicators of H. Sandy Recovery”

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From the site NJ.com: See: 10 indicators of Hurricane Sandy recovery. The lead in to the list of 10 follows:

Nineteen months after Sandy, how far along are New Jersey and its residents in getting back on their feet? It’s clear that substantial progress has been made from the days when boardwalks were heaps of rubble and piles of sand and debris lined the streets.

But how much work remains to be done, and what challenges lie ahead? Here’s a sampling of 10 indicators providing snapshots of where the recovery stands at this point.

Environmental Damage Done re Canadian Tar Sands

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Photographer Captures Tar Sands ‘Destruction’ From Above

Photographer and pilot Alex MacLean wanted to learn more about the Keystone XL pipeline, which if approved will carry oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, so he decided to take pictures from above of the tar sands that will supply oil to the project. What he found shocked him.

“The scale of the operation is staggering,” MacLean told The Huffington Post. It’s “mind-boggling,” he said, how expansive it is, and how much money is being poured into drilling and strip mining for the viscous petroleum product that will give the Keystone XL pipeline its oil.

Cost of Disasters to Homeowners is Growing

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In the weekend edition of the Wall St. Journal there is an article titled “Don’t Wait for Disaster to Strike.” The subtitle is:These days, when catastrophes occur, insurance coverage can be limited – and homeowners ofter bear more the costs. Here is how to contain the damage.

You may have to subscribe to the paper to get the full story. But there is a interesting map of Disasters in the U.S., 1984-2013, that accompanies the article.

Health Workshop and Resources from NIH

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A Disaster Research Response Workshop: Enabling Public Health Research During Disasters was held June 12-13, 2014 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, MD. Workshop presentations and recordings are available from http://www.nationalacademies.org/HMD/Activities/PublicHealth/MedPrep/2014-JUN-13.aspx.

 This workshop will examine strategies and partnerships for methodologically and ethically sound public health and medical research during future emergencies. Discussions will include  issues with obtaining informed consent, obtaining approval from Institutional Review Boards, coordinating research efforts with emergency response, and ensuring timely collection of data.

The workshop is a collaboration of the NIH Disaster Research Response Project, the IOM Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events, the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The NIH Disaster Research Response Project is a pilot project led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), aimed at developing ready-to-go research data collection tools and a network of trained research responders.

The project’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for researchers to begin collecting health and other data following a major disaster. The focus is on data collection tools and protocols, the creation of networks of health experts also trained as research responders, and integration of the effort into federal response plans for future disasters. Although initially focused on environmental health issues, the hope is this project will be a model for timely collection of data supporting a range of medical and public health research. 

As part of this project, NIEHS recently held a tabletop exercise in Long Beach, CA to test how a “research response” might work and what would be expected of researchers choosing to be trained research responders, i.e. first on the scene to begin collecting data once it is safe and reasonable to do so. The article “Tsunami exercise helps prepare research community for disaster response” [http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/newsletter/2014/5/spotlight-tsunami/] describes the exercise and there’s also a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcfxLmfXUE4&feature=youtu.be&a.

Disaster Lit: the Resource Guide for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (from NLM) now includes records for research tools, such as online surveys and interview scripts, to aid researchers in quickly selecting appropriate measures.

Under the Threshold for a Presidential Declaration

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Most of the time when we talk about disasters, they qualify for a presidential disaster declaration and involve FEMA. But smaller events are serious too and pose special problems when federal assistance is not forthcoming

Thanks to James Fossett for sending in this article: Local Efforts to Stem Chronic Flooding Drop in the Bucket. He noted:

Your readers might be interested in this article, which chronicles the difficulties a number of communities in the Hudson Valley are having trying to get out ahead of local flooding, for which they are at very high risk. Most of these incidents don’t rise to the level of a federally declared emergency, which in New York has a threshold of $25 million, so they’re more or less completely on their own when it comes to recovery and local flood control.