Trial by fire

Victoria is facing its driest summer for nearly one hundred years, with conditions worse than in 1983 when the state was swept by the devastating Ash Wednesday bushfires. The fires were particularly fierce in Mount Macedon in central Victoria, and the Woodend Fire Brigade is in the front line of the struggle to avoid a repeat of Ash Wednesday. Trial by Fire follows this brigade as they do all that they can to keep their community safe from the devastation of the fires.

What determines Australia's response to emergency and natural disasters

This article examines the determinants of Australia's response to emergencies and natural disasters. It examines the response from the Australian public by examining contributions made to the appeals of the country's largest Non-Governmental Organisation: World Vision of Australia. It also examines the response of the Australian Government. The data include 43 emergencies and natural disasters since 1998. Results suggest that the responses from both the public and government are positively associated with the number of people affected, media coverage, and the level of political and civil freedom in the country where the event occurred. The type and location of the emergency or disaster are important for the public's response. Differences between public and government donations exist: support from the Australian Government is positively associated with smaller countries and there is some evidence that the public donates more to events occurring in larger and poorer countries.

Spontaneous Volunteering During Natural Disasters

The recent spate of natural disasters across Australia has led to an outpouring of spontaneous volunteering, both formally through nonprofit and government agencies and informally through local community and online networks. Relatively little is understood about the motivations and characteristics of spontaneous volunteers. The aims of this project were to:  Examine the characteristics and motivations of spontaneous volunteers who respond to a crisis event;  Illuminate the effects of spontaneous volunteering on personal, social and civic networks;  Explicate the conditions under which sustained volunteering and other forms of civic engagement arise from spontaneous volunteering and;  Consider the practical implications of these findings for organisations involved in coordinating volunteers both with and beyond disaster events.

Report of the training workshop on the ECLAC methodology for assessing the macroeconomic, social and environmental impacts of natural disasters

.--Attendance.--Opening.--Agenda.--Special aspects of disasters in the context of small island States in the Caribbean.--Methodological and conceptual aspects of assessment.--Sector evaluation.--Infrastructure.--Economic (productive) sectors.--Information systems.--Effects of damages.--Institutional capacity.--Definition of the reconstruction strategy.--Closing remarks by presenters of the methodology.--Feedback, critique and comments on the ECLAC methodology.--Disaster assessment experiences.--Policy implications.--Follow-up.

Natural disasters and their economic and social impact

Includes bibliography

El Salvador: los desastres naturales de 1982 y sus repercusiones sobre el desarrollo económico y social = El Salvador: the natural disasters of 1982 and their effects on economic and social development

Incluye Bibliografía

Reducing the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder in children following natural disasters

A significant number of children suffer long term psychological disturbance following exposure to a natural disaster. Evidence suggests that a dose-response relationship exists, so that children and adolescents who experience the most intense or extensive exposure to the risk factors for PTSD are likely to develop the most serious and persistent symptoms. Risk factors include gender, age, personality, extent of exposure to the natural disaster, amount of damage to property and infrastructure, witnessing injury or death of others or perceiving a threat to their own life. Knowing these factors enables various strategies to be put in place to decrease the risk of psychological disturbance following the aftermath of traumatic events. Re-establishing a sense of safety, security and normality is important in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and promoting social connectedness, positive family functioning, and effective coping mechanisms can make children more resilient in the face of catastrophic events. This paper examines the risk and protective factors associated with the development of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and considers how schools can use this knowledge to contribute to the recovery effort, and reduce the prevalence of PTSD amongst pupils in the wake of a natural disaster.

Surviving the Titanic disaster : economic, natural and social determinants

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third class. British passengers were more likely to perish than members of other nations. This extreme event represents a rare case of a well-documented life and death situation where social norms were enforced. This paper shows that economic analysis can account for human behavior in such situations.

Tools and methods for capturing Twitter data during natural disasters

During the course of several natural disasters in recent years, Twitter has been found to play an important role as an additional medium for many–to–many crisis communication. Emergency services are successfully using Twitter to inform the public about current developments, and are increasingly also attempting to source first–hand situational information from Twitter feeds (such as relevant hashtags). The further study of the uses of Twitter during natural disasters relies on the development of flexible and reliable research infrastructure for tracking and analysing Twitter feeds at scale and in close to real time, however. This article outlines two approaches to the development of such infrastructure: one which builds on the readily available open source platform yourTwapperkeeper to provide a low–cost, simple, and basic solution; and, one which establishes a more powerful and flexible framework by drawing on highly scaleable, state–of–the–art technology.

Lessons from media reporting of natural disasters : a case study of the 2011 flash floods in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley

Practice-led journalism research techniques were used in this study to produce a ‘first draft of history’ recording the human experience of survivors and rescuers during the January 2011 flash flood disaster in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, Australia. The study aimed to discover what can be learnt from engaging in journalistic reporting of natural disasters. This exegesis demonstrates that journalism can be both a creative practice and a research methodology. About 120 survivors, rescuers and family members of victims participated in extended interviews about what happened to them and how they survived. Their stories are the basis for two creative outputs of the study: a radio documentary and a non-fiction book, that document how and why people died, or survived, or were rescued. Listeners and readers are taken "into the flood" where they feel anxious for those in peril, relief when people are saved, and devastated when babies, children and adults are swept away to their deaths. In undertaking reporting about the human experience of the floods, several significant elements about journalistic reportage of disasters were exposed. The first related to the vital role that the online social media played during the disaster for individuals, citizen reporters, journalists and emergency services organisations. Online social media offer reporters powerful new reporting tools for both gathering and disseminating news. The second related to the performance of journalists in covering events involving traumatic experiences. Journalists are often required to cover trauma and are often amongst the first-responders to disasters. This study found that almost all of the disaster survivors who were approached were willing to talk in detail about their traumatic experiences. A finding of this project is that journalists who interview trauma survivors can develop techniques for improving their ability to interview people who have experienced traumatic events. These include being flexible with interview timing and selecting a location; empowering interviewees to understand they don’t have to answer every question they are asked; providing emotional security for interviewees; and by being committed to accuracy. Survivors may exhibit posttraumatic stress symptoms but some exhibit and report posttraumatic growth. The willingness of a high proportion of the flood survivors to participate in the flood research made it possible to document a relatively unstudied question within the literature about journalism and trauma – when and why disaster survivors will want to speak to reporters. The study sheds light on the reasons why a group of traumatised people chose to speak about their experiences. Their reasons fell into six categories: lessons need to be learned from the disaster; a desire for the public to know what had happened; a sense of duty to make sure warning systems and disaster responses to be improved in future; personal recovery; the financial disinterest of reporters in listening to survivors; and the timing of the request for an interview. Feedback to the creative-practice component of this thesis - the book and radio documentary - shows that these issues are not purely matters of ethics. By following appropriate protocols, it is possible to produce stories that engender strong audience responses such as that the program was "amazing and deeply emotional" and "community storytelling at its most important". Participants reported that the experience of the interview process was "healing" and that the creative outcome resulted in "a very precious record of an afternoon of tragedy and triumph and the bitter-sweetness of survival".

Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters : The Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquakes

Over the past decade, social media have gone through a process of legitimation and official adoption, and they are now becoming embedded as part of the official communications apparatus of many commercial and public-sector organisations— in turn, providing platforms like Twitter with their own sources of legitimacy. Arguably, the demonstrated utility of social media platforms and tools in times of crisis—from civil unrest and violent crime through to natural disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, and floods—has been a crucial driver of this newfound legitimacy. In the mid-2000s, user-created content and ‘Web 2.0’ platforms were known to play a role in crisis communication; back then, the involvement of extra-institutional actors in providing and sharing information around such events involved distributed, ad hoc, or niche platforms (like Flickr), and was more likely to be framed as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘crowdsourcing’ (see, for example, Liu, Palen, Sutton, Hughes, & Vieweg, 2008, on the then-emerging role of photo-sharing in disasters). Since then, the dramatically increased take-up of mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter means that the pool of potential participants in online crisis communication has broadened to include a much larger proportion of the general population, as well as traditional media and official emergency response organisations.