Although I’ve worked for Amanda, and with The Unthinkable for over two years, I was completely unprepared for the unthinkable when it hit Washington, DC, last week.
My commute, door-to-door is 8.8 miles. In normal circumstances the drive might take 30 minutes. At the absolute worst: 45 minutes. Last Wednesday, it took me 6 hours.
I grew up just north of Boston and am no stranger to winter weather and snow driving. Yet no one could have convinced me that a mere 4 or 5 inches of snow and sleet would have caused the kind…
Nuclear bomb survival doesn’t tend to come up in conversation often these days. But when it does, I immediately think of my parents and the infamous drills of the ‘50s, which seem so quaint now. These days, nuclear bombs conjure up images of automatic, mass death and suffering, or, in the words of my dad when we discussed it today, “We’re all fried anyway.”
But that’s a dated perception, it turns out. First of all, a terrorist’s nuclear bomb is likely to be much smaller—and more survivable—than a Soviet bomb. And according to the New York…
The country lost one of its most devoted and creative disaster-preparedness advocates on Monday. John Solomon, a journalist and blogger, was a force for change and for resilience. He believed that the public was the nation’s most vital asset in dealing with terrorism and emergencies of all kinds. He was curious, modest and dedicated until the end.
Two years ago, I wrote an essay in TIME about the radical genius of creating a cabinet-level position to manage volunteers in California, America’s Disaster Laboratory. Today, we have more big news coming out of the lab.
Secretary Karen Baker, the woman who got that job on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s cabinet, is introducing the nation’s first Disaster Corps—a squad of 1,000 elite, well-trained volunteers who can can be deployed to disaster sites as soon as they are needed (without waiting for the soul-killing bureaucratic sign-offs that so often delay volunteer efforts after…
I just wrote a review of a strange and compelling book that I want to tell you about. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, is by Rebecca Solnit, an author and essayist.
The book chronicles five disasters—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. But instead of rehashing the old stories of suffering and redemption, Solnit focuses on the ways many people seemed to thrive in some ways in the midst of all that…
This year, Americans will experience some 1,200 tornadoes and 8,000 wildfires. A handful of storms will probably turn into honest-to-God hurricanes. Disasters are getting more common and more expensive, largely because we keep moving more of our valuables into the country’s most beautiful, unstable places.
Watching over this all-night, boom-bust casino is Craig Fugate, the new head of FEMA under President Barack Obama. Check out my story in the new Atlantic about why Fugate, a former firefighter, is an unusual choice for the job.
My prediction is that Fugate’s personality will be an…
Wherever I go to talk about the brain in disasters, I get asked one question in particular: What about children? How does a child’s brain respond to a disaster? Is it different than an adult’s brain?
Yes, very different. And the differences make children both better and worse at responding to disasters. It depends on the age of the child and the type of disaster, of course, along with a million other caveats. But here’s what we know:
* Before a disaster strikes—Young children have extremely plastic brains. They can learn faster than adults, making them ideal targets for…
IN AMERICA, THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT spend millions of dollars a year holding training drills and tabletop exercises. All well and good. But when was the last time that you—the most important person on the scene—got invited?
Thanks to John Solomon for flagging last week’s 5-day nationwide drill in Israel as a model for a meaningful drill. Imagine: a drill that includes the entire population—and features surprise scenarios that require people to take action.
