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.

 

 

New Theory Worth Pondering

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I ran across this article in a source I am not familiar with called Motherboard. Clearly the title is catchy:The More Environmental Disasters a State Suffers, the More Repressive Its Laws. The two authors, from the Univ. of MD, have created an interesting index of states and their characteristics.  Below are a few excepts from an interview with the authors of the full study:

* * * Ecological factors contribute to people growing tighter—the idea being that, when you have a lot of threat, tightness is a reaction to that,” he said. “The data is all correlation. We can’t prove it at this time, but theoretically we think it’s causal.”

In fact, environmental vulnerabilities are the ones that most closely correlate with a tight society, not factors such as external threats. In fact, even long histories of being discriminatory are less correlated with this idea of a “tight” state than natural disasters. I suggested that, maybe, a history of slavery or traditional values could have had something to do with longstanding inequality in the South. And yes, there was a connection between the number of families that owned slaves at the end of the Civil War with tightness today, but it wasn’t as strong as the environmental factors: “Floods and natural disasters seem to be the strongest,” he said.

Again—really, this isn’t something that can be proven. There are any number of reasons why antiquated laws have persisted in the certain areas of the country, and there are a lot of reasons why some have been slower to embrace equality for all of its citizens. But now we know that being put in a bad situation, environmentally-speaking, might have something to do with it.
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The original source of the content was is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: See: Tightness–looseness across the 50 united states by Jesse R. Harrington and Michele J. Gelfand. The full text is 6 pages; it is available as a free download, but you have to fish around to find it.

The article is quite dense and not an easy read. Nevertheless, the topic is quite fascinating and I would like to get readers’ reactions.