See the new article titled The Missing Piece of NIMS: Teaching Incident Commanders How to Function in the Edge of Chaos, by Cynthia Renaud. It just was published in the current issue of the online HSAJ ( hsaj.org).
I found it fascinating and recommend it highly.
Thanks to the FAS, these Congressional Research Service reports are available to the public. Not clear why research done with taxpayer money is so hard to find! Go to this link.
The full title of this report is Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security: Condensed Version
. You can download the Executive Summary (14 pp.) or the whole report (227 pp.) at no cost from the NAS website. [Thank you NAS for making all products available!]
From the UN report: see this short report.
One additional report, which deals with business recovery, gleaned from Prevention Web is here.
See also the comments below from reader in Christchurch.
From. Prof. Dan Aldrich, here is a copy of his new bibliography (31 pp.) on the Politics of Natural Disasters. Aldrich is with Purdue University.
Sections include general overviews, centers and data sources, comparative approach, case studies of individual disasters, recovery, natural, man-made, and natural/technological disasters, mitigation, preparation, and insurance, ulnerabilities, evacuation, emergent groups, disaster myths and behavior, humanitarian response, governance during and after, social capital in disaster recovery, political outcomes, political and economic impact, temporary housing, and resilience.
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Please patronize our sponsor, the Disaster Bookstore.
This new report highlights the fire risks expected. I guess what is happening right now in N.M. is an indication of the record-setting fires we might expect to occur.
In today’s Wall St. Journal there is an article about the big banks, the ones that are too large to fail, needing a Living Will. For some time I have been thinking that large municipalities, or perhaps regions, need a Living Will. So, if it is a good ideal for a big business, it would probably be appropriate for a large public entity.
I think if we talked about cities needing a Living Will, rather than a recovery plan, more people might understand that and do something about it.
Your comments are invited.
For information about the CUSEC New Madrid Seismic Zone Catastrophic Planning Project, see http://cusec.org/new-madrid-seismic-zone/new-madrid-seismic-zone-catastrophic-planning-project/
Related articles
A short (13 page) new report by the GAO titled Disaster Recovery: Selected themes for Effective Long Term Recovery, provides an excellent summary of several GAO studies on the topic. It highlights 3 themes, providing useful details about problems we have long known about, including two of my pet peeves — lack of implementation and lack of assessments and evaluations of recovery progress. [GAO-12-813T]
FEMA News Photo
The Diva just returned from the 3 day annual Higher Ed Conference, sponsored by FEMA at their training facility in Emmitsburg, MD. For more details about the conference content and attendees, go to this link. More than 220 institutions in the U.S. teach courses on emergency management and homeland security. Plus, there were attendees from Canada and a few other countries.
There are many changes occurring and and concerns abound about higher ed in EM, some of which I hope to blog about in future postings. The year attendance was at an all time high, with more than 400 participants. Copies of many presentations were collected on a CD rather than an oversized loose-leaf notebook. Presently, the content materials are not on the Higher Ed website. I suggest you write the staff to check on availability of the CD.
Recovery Diva 