This is a question that guided my students and I in developing a fictional news site www.resilientkingcounty.org with fake stories about a 10 year anniversary of a future Seattle Fault earthquake. Students used information generated during workshops I designed and facilitated with King County Office of Emergency Management as part of their Resilient King County initiative. Participants of …
A journal article describing the static elements of the theoretical framework that informs most of the posts of this site has been published by Environmental Hazards. You can grab the PDF here.
Have you ever wondered just what disaster research is and how resilience fits into that field? I had the fortune to be asked by the National Academy of Science and Kavli Foundation to talk about just that topic. You’ll recognize many topics I’ve discussed on ResilScience throughout this video. It’s only 20 minutes long, there …
I have the privilege of speaking at the 50th Anniversary celebration for the Disaster Research Center at University of Delaware. As part of this event, each speaker was asked to write a 1000 word thought piece that the disaster research community could read and comment on in person and on the DRC’s website. Although my paper is posted on their …
Roger Pielke wrote an article at FiveThirtyEight about whether the rising costs of disasters are linked to climate change. The article got a lot of comments and generated some critical press As a result, Roger posted a followup to quell the critics. What’s all the hubbub? Roger’s conclusion is that rising disaster costs are not the result of climate change. Or at …
The last couple posts I’ve made have had a lot of equations or graphs. I figured it’s time to get back to writing about theory, which is really the motivating reason for creating this website. The scholarly literature has a number of conceptual frameworks of community resilience to disasters (for example, Berkes 2007; Cutter et al. 2008; Norris et al. 2008; Bruneau et al., 2003; Paton and Johnston …
Have you ever had the power go out at your home or your place of work? I think everyone’s hands go up at this question. What’s the longest you’ve gone without power? You in the back: 13 days?! Wow. Personally, I’ve never gone more than a day. I’ve met the people who restore the power …
I just saw this article in Huffington Post about how the role of fat in nutrition has been misunderstood (at least by the public and policy makers) for the past couple decades. Fat does not make you fat and good fat is a critical part of energy production in the body. In fact, fat is the most efficient …
At the Natural Hazards Workshop this year, Daniel Aldrich gave a keynote talk about his findings from researching correlations between various variables and community recovery from disasters. In particular, he focused on his awesome empirical study of Kobe’s recovery from the 1995 earthquake. (While its not relevant to this post, he found that proxies of social capital had the greatest …
I had a chance recently to walk around the Rockaways in Queens, NY about eight months after the area was heavily damaged by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. Multiple things struck me–most of all how far the area had bounced back with respect to clean up and reconstruction. I noticed two small examples of …