Compounding Hazards & Natural Disasters

The most essential, and possibly the most reliably present, characteristic of all disasters is that they exert strong impact on social relationships.

So the Allens did too. They knew the assisted living facility where Mark’s mother lived was in the path of fast-moving flames. They sped toward the facility, called Villa Capri, the air smoky, the care home dark at two in the morning.

The building had no power. Almost all of the 62 elderly residents were still in their rooms. The Allens found the few overnight staff still left in the building.

As many as 2 million Californians experienced one-hour blackouts on Friday and Saturday nights as the state triggered rolling power outages for the first time in nearly two decades amid a record-breaking heat wave.

In preparing for and responding to the Extreme Heat Event, all agencies of state government use and employ state personnel, equipment, and facilities or perform any and all activities consistent with the direction of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and the State Emergency Plan. Also, all residents are to obey the direction of emergency officials with regard to this emergency in order to protect their safety.

California’s plight took center stage Monday in the race for the White House as President Donald Trump visited the Golden State in the midst of an epic wildfire season that has ravaged Western states, blaming “forest management” and discarding a warning that a warming planet is making the fires worse.

“It will start getting cooler,” Trump told California officials during a briefing on the wildfires in Sacramento. “You just watch.”

The hope for relief from smoke-filled skies that weather and air quality forecasters once thought may arrive as the work week began was replaced Monday by the reality that the cloud of soot resulting from fires up and down the West Coast is sticking around at least a few more days.

As a leader, it’s your role to step up and organize people and resources to help your community through crises. But (especially in 2020), it’s never “just one thing.”  How do you lead during compounding crises when they keep cascading? How do you lead when many of the issues at hand are not in your wheelhouse or seem beyond your reach—but people are still looking to you for leadership?

A Podcast to Help You Understand What’s Going on

Every week, Dr. Jones sits down to share her insights and perspective on the chaotic world around us on her podcast, Getting Through It, co-hosted with community resilience expert John Bwarie. The duo were co-creators of The Great Shake-Out and worked to create sweeping policy changes in seismic safety in the City of Los Angeles and dozens of other communities across California.

The Sierra Nevada hasn’t provided nearly as much water as predicted. Now the state is struggling to overhaul its snow runoff forecasts. Packed onto the slopes of the Sierra Nevada is a precious source of water for California — a frozen reservoir that climate change is already transforming.

Still resisting statewide water rationing for parched California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking local suppliers to tighten water limits. As a dry summer looms, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered water suppliers across California to step up their local drought responses, but fell short of requiring water rationing or setting a statewide conservation target.

Gov. Gavin Newsom claims progress on settling California’s decades-long conflict over water allocation but it’s a partial deal at best. The holy grail of those involved in California’s decades-long political and legal battle over how the state’s water supply should be allocated has been some sort of master agreement.

Lifeline disruptions can represent a serious economic threat at various scales. However, firm-level empirical evidence regarding the consequences and reliability of lifeline services, and how lifeline service disruptions impact on economic losses after disasters, is still lacking.

California’s year of pandemic, recession and civic unrest also includes angst over the outcome of the 2020 census. The state likely will lose at least one congressional seat and perhaps two.

This study developed a chatbot to improve the efficiency of government activation of mine safety procedures during natural disasters. Taiwan has a comprehensive governmental system dedicated to responding to frequent natural disasters, and the Bureau of Mines has instituted clear procedures to ensure the delivery of disaster alarms and damage reports.

The world faces difficulties managing disasters while making efforts to slowing the spread of COVID-19. The paper aims at proposing policies and approaches to manage dual disasters of flooding and COVID-19.

To accelerate our pace and meet the challenges of current and future health threats, we must advance our world-class data and analytics capabilities; maintain and expand our state-of-the-art public health laboratory capacity; continue building a workforce of trusted, expert, public health professionals; sustain our capacity to rapidly respond to outbreaks at their source; and assure a strong global and domestic preparedness capacity.

Although Croatia was struck by a major earthquake amidst the COVID-19 epidemic, the spread of the epidemic has not accelerated and the country still has one of the lowest COVID-19 rates in Europe

Food systems are fundamental to human health and flourishing and constitute one of the major pathways of human impact on the environment. Impacts include habitat loss (which is implicated in the spread of zoonotic disease like COVID-19), water resource depletion, perturbation of biochemical cycling (including greenhouse gas emissions), pollution, and waste to name just a few.

A federal judge gave PG&E Corp. a green light to exit bankruptcy, but the California utility is leaving chapter 11 more leveraged than ever after settling billions of dollars in liability claims from wildfires sparked by its equipment.

It depends if your worldview is "half-empty" or "half-full." In any case, analysis of the latest cybercrime data is in and it's clear that cybercriminals had a busy 2019. The volume of global threats against business endpoints has increased 13% year-over-year.