After much pondering of the question, I have come to the conclusion that resilience is an illusion. This is not to denigrate the work of resilience managers, as there is obviously much to ...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2024/05/resilience-is-illusion.html
National elections in the United Kingdom are likely to bring a change in the political complexion of the government. This short essay puts the case for coming together to put pressure on...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-proposed-strategy-to-advocate-for.html
Vajont is located about 100 km due north of Venice in the eastern extension of the Italian Dolomite Mountains, a part of the Alpine arc. It is also situated on the boundary between the It...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-vajont-dam-disaster-sixty-years-on.html
A piece of the Sanriku coast at Minamisanriku, NE Japan. In 2011 there was a 20.5-metre tsunami here. In 19...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-real-burden-of-risk.html
At the time of writing this, the UK Government has just released the 2023 edition of the National Risk Register (NRR, HM Government 2023). This document was first published in 2008 and ha...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-united-kingdoms-national-risk.html
What are the likely consequences of prolonged, wide-area electrical power failure? lifts blocked: people possibly trapped in them trains stranded: people possibly stranded in them traffic ...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2023/03/prolonged-wide-area-electrical-power.html
Source: Wikimedia Commons An interesting map was published by the US Geological Survey shortly after ...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2023/02/reflections-on-turkish-syrian.html
In an article in Times Higher Education Professor Harvey J. Graff described malpractice among academic journal editors and called for a bill of rights to protect authors against such exc...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/12/academic-publishing-and-malpractice.html
WELCOME TO THE 'RISKSCAPE' On one day in July 2021 fires devastated large areas of Sardinia, flooding occurred for the second time in two weeks in London and I received a message from r...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/10/managing-emergencies-challenges-of.html
Few would deny that there is a general air of malaise in academia at the moment. I look around at colleagues and their attitudes seem to vary along a spectrum from combative anger, through pe...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/10/can-we-stop-rot-in-academia.html
A principle of cascading disasters is that the world is ever more closely linked by networks on which we all depend for communications, commerce, enlightenment and entertainment. When disaster s...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/04/foresight.html
1. Preamble 1.1 The purpose of this charter is to specify the responsibilities of the state and citizens in the field of resilience against disasters, crises and major public...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/03/a-resilience-charter.html
By convention, when we study disasters we exclude warfare. It is not easy to find a completely logical reason for this. It is more a matter of convenience and a feeling that to conflate the t...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-disaster-of-war.html
I must admit that I was in the middle of my post-doctoral fellowship (at UCL) before I fully realised what research involves. It suddenly clicked while I was desperately trying to learn clay ...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/02/for-new-research-students-how-to-stop.html
I live in a short street that connects a 15th-century convent to a Napoleonic-era theatre. On one side there is a park full of ornamental trees, in the middle there is a via crucis flanke...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/02/how-shall-we-communicate-risk-in-era-of.html
The island of Capri seen from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius (photo: D. Alexander) There are two things we don’t teach our students but we should: to see and to listen. They are virtues--and sk...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2022/01/seeing-and-hearing-underrated-skills.html
Although we need to change attitudes to disaster from response to preparedness and prevention, this must not be done at the expense of our ability to respond to disasters when they occur. In ...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-five-minute-plea-for-better-civil.html
Some years ago I met a 31-year-old Bulgarian policeman whose main claim to fame was that he had been the Chief of Police for the Republic of Haiti for 20 minutes, or in other words until so...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2021/08/haiti-has-there-been-progress-in.html
The tsunami museum at Rikusentakata, seen from atop the coastal tsunami barrier across the land that was devastated by the waves in March 2011 Thursday 11th March 2021 was the tenth anniver...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2021/03/gejet-great-eastern-japan-earthquake.html
The current system for managing major incidents and disasters in the United Kingdom was devised after the Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, riots of 1986 and reflects a preoccupation with public ord...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-brief-critique-of-uk-emergency.html
Laviano, Province of Avellino, 1984 Monday 23rd November 2020 at 19:34 and 52.8 seconds marked the fortieth anniversary of the 1980 southern Italian earthquake in which I was directly i...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-1980-southern-italian-earthquake.html
1. WHAT ARE, AND HAVE BEEN, THE KEY CHALLENGES IN COPING WITH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC? The first challenge is to understand the behaviour of an emerging disease caused by a new variant of a v...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2020/12/four-questions-about-covid-19-pandemic.html
Since the start of the crisis, I have constantly affirmed that the key to understanding the effects of this pandemic is the UK Government's failure to give adequate weight to emergency planni...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2020/10/state-of-nation-uk-perspective-on-covid.html
Image: US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases In terms of its scope, Covid-19 is like no other disaster that has occurred in the last 100 years, since, in fact, the influen...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2020/06/interpreting-covid-19-as-disaster.html
A few days ago, I was accused of "putting the careers of trainees and junior faculty at risk" because a member of my editorial team was slow to complete the review process on a paper that had...
http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2020/04/more-on-covid-19-academic-gold-rush.html