Social Science Disasters

Kiwi nurse-midwife, Barbara Walker - who spent 20 years working for international aid agencies - shares her dramatic, heart-rending, and inspiring stories of the situations she faced and the people she sought to help. From the Sakeo One Refugee Camp in Thailand, where she cared for those fleeing Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia in a make-shift bamboo-framed field hospital, to her last placement in Mozambique that ended due to a death threat, Barbara’s Christian faith gave her strength and kept her focused.

In 2014, after fighting through yards of bureaucratic red tape, leaving her family, and putting her own health at risk in order to help suffering strangers, Kwan Kew Lai finally arrived in Africa to volunteer as an infectious disease specialist in the heart of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. What she found was not only blistering heat, inhospitable working conditions, and deadly, unrelenting illness, but hope, resilience, and incredible courage.

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.

The Esperanza Fire started October 26, 2006, in the San Jacinto Mountains above the Banning Pass near Cabazon, California. It destroyed 41,000 acres and dozens of homes and cost the taxpayers $16 million dollars. But by far the highest costs of the conflagration were the lives of the five-man crew of Engine 57, the first engine crew ever killed fighting a wildland blaze. Fire and superheated gases had erupted in a freak "area ignition," sending flames racing across three-quarters of a mile in mere seconds, engulfing the crew and the house they were defending.

Words Whispered in Water is the story of how - against all odds - one woman exposed the culprit in the catastrophic flooding and compelled the news media, and the government, to tell the truth. Words Whispered in Water highlights the importance of exposing the bad behavior of giant corporations and bureaucracies whose unsavory activities affect millions of people, because once bad behavior is exposed, there is noticeably less fraud and better behavior on the part of an organization.

An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford. We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of Covid-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. To Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, this is a retrograde notion. He believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report.

DAS Buch zur Ahrtal-Katastrophe. In seinem multimedialen Tagebuch gibt Markus Wipperfürth, der als Spontanhelfer in den ersten Stunden nach der verheerenden Flutkatastrophe ins Ahrtal kam, einen exklusiven Einblick in seine Erlebnisse der ersten Tage, Wochen und Monate nach der größten Naturkatastrophe in der deutschen Nachkriegszeit.Der Pulheimer Landwirts, der durch seine enorme Reichweite in den sozialen Medien zum Katastrophen-Koordinator, Kommunikationsknotenpunkt und Schwarzen Brett des Ahrtals wurde und dringend benötigte Helfer, Hilfsgüter und Maschinen ins Katastrophengebiet gebracht hat.

Tony Redmond is one of the few truly good people you will ever meet. His is a story of tireless hard work and astonishing bravery across wars, refugee crises, air crashes, earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes and disease outbreaks for more than 30 years. Featuring stories of hope and redemption, as well as untold suffering and mismanagement, this unique account could only have been written one who has for decades performed incredible feats of altruism.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative, author Kate Parker Horigan shows how the public understands and remembers large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, outlining which stories are remembered and why, as well as the impact on public memory and the survivors themselves. This project is rooted in Horigan's experiences living in New Orleans before and after Katrina, but it is also a case study illustrating that survivors' stories should be shared in a way that includes their own engagement with narrative production, circulation, and reception.

In 2005, 15 workers were killed when BP's Texas City Refinery exploded. In 2006, corroded pipes owned by BP led to an oil spill in Alaska. Now, in 2010, 11 men drilling for BP were killed in the blowout of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. What's next? In In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race That Took It Down, Stanley Reed - a journalist who has covered BP for over a decade - and investigative reporter Alison Fitzgerald answer not only that question, but also examine why these disasters happen to BP so much more than other large oil companies.

An exhilarating, immersive journey into the Exclusion Zone of Chornobyl by one of Ukraine's most exciting young authors. The 1,000-square-mile Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is, for many, a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of shattered ideals and lost lives, now a toxic, dangerous no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it became a site of pilgrimage. He and dozens like him call themselves 'stalkers': wild adventurers who sneak past border patrols to spend days getting lost in this apocalyptic environment of dense swampland and desolate villages.

Since the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, the area remains a toxic, forbidden wasteland. The zone has become a place for meditation at the edge of geography where you can lose yourself. As with all dangerous places, this terra incognita attracts a wild assortment of adventurers. Markiyan Kamysh, whose father was an on-site disaster liquidator, works as a "stalker," guiding people who dare to venture into the disaster area for thrills. Kamysh tells us about thieves who hide in the abandoned buildings, the policemen who chase them, and the romantic utopists who have built families here.

In 1930, the Ohio Penitentiary caught fire shortly after inmates had returned to their locked cells after supper. In less than an hour, 320 men succumbed to fire and smoke in what remains the deadliest prison disaster in United States history.

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information—social media, satellite imagery, and more—is often referred to as Big Data. Making sense of this data deluge during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations, which explains why they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians.

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. But the devastating storm is only the beginning of this story. The hurricane's long effects intermingled with ongoing processes of economic downturn, racial oppression, resistance, and environmental change. In the Lowcountry, the political, economic, and social conditions of Jim Crow were inextricable from its environmental dimensions.

Ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest, the Currowan fire was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia's Black Summer. It burnt for 74 days, consuming nearly 5,000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. In the aftermath, there were questions. Why were resources so few that many faced the flames alone? Why was there back-burning on a day of extreme fire danger? Why weren’t they better prepared?

Después de un desastre, sea provocado por el hombre o por la naturaleza, ¿la gente se vuelve más altruista, ingeniosa y valiente? ¿A qué deben él ánimo las nuevas comunidades que surgen entre las ruinas y en momentos de crisis, con sus nuevos propósitos? ¿Qué revela su alegría sobre la posibilidad y el deseo de cambio social, normalmente insatisfecho? Solnit explora este fenómeno a través de algunas calamidades como el terremoto de 1906 en San Francisco, la explosión que casi acabó con Halifax en 1917, el terremoto de Ciudad de México de 1985, el 11-S en Nueva York y el huracán Katrina, que arrasó Nueva Orleans.

An account of the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in which White people attacked and murdered Black residents in the Greenwood neighborhood burning and looting. Includes a collection of shorter witness testimonials and a partial list of property and financial losses of its victims.

Matt Damon besuchte 2006 das ländliche Sambia und traf dort Frauen und Mädchen, die täglich mehrere Stunden damit zubrachten, ihre Familien mit Wasser aus weit entfernten Quellen zu versorgen – Zeit, die ihnen fehlte, um zu spielen, zur Schule zu gehen oder eigenes Geld zu verdienen. Über zwei Milliarden Menschen weltweit haben keinen sicheren Zugang zu sauberem Trinkwasser und sanitären Anlagen.