The Vajont Dam Disaster, Sixty Years On
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
5M ago
  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 Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli Venezia-Giulia. The Vajont valley is an eastern lateral tributary to the Piave River, which flows into the Adriatic Sea northeast of the Venetian lagoon. The area is renowned for the First World War battles that were fought at various locations there. In the late 1950s, SADE, the regional hydroelectric company, prepared to build a dam on the Vajont stream. The locati ..read more
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The real burden of risk
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
7M ago
                         A piece of the Sanriku coast at Minamisanriku, NE Japan.                        In 2011 there was a 20.5-metre tsunami here. In 1966 the eminent Californian risk analyst Chauncey Starr published a seminal paper in Science Magazine in which he stated that "a thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable." In effect, he built his reputation on the premise that the acceptability of risk is ..read more
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The United Kingdom's National Risk Register - 2023 Edition
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
8M ago
  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 has been updated (somewhat irregularly) at roughly two-year intervals. The new version presents 89 major hazards and threats that could potentially disrupt life in the United Kingdom and possibly cause casualties and damage. Over the years this document has acquired momentum based on a solid commitment to persist with it and create periodic revisions. It is the public face of the National Security Risk A ..read more
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Prolonged, wide-area electrical power failure
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
1y ago
What are the likely consequences of prolonged, wide-area electrical power failure? lifts [elevators] blocked: people possibly trapped in them trains stranded: people possibly stranded in them traffic control inoperable: possibility of accidents and queues at road junctions critical facilities (hospitals, police stations, etc.) dependent on their own generators food refrigeration stops: perished food needs to be disposed of food manufacture lines cease operation; food perishes no water or sewerage pumping: health and safety regulations put buildings out of use electric cars and electrical equ ..read more
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Reflections on the Turkish-Syrian Earthquakes of 6th February 2023: Building Collapse and its Consequences
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
1y ago
                                                          Source: Wikimedia Commons An interesting map was published by the US Geological Survey shortly after the Turkish-Syrian earthquakes.[1] It showed (perhaps somewhat predictively) that there was only one tiny square of the vast affected area in which Modified Mercalli intensity (which is largely a measure of damage) reached 9.0, the 'violent' level.[2] This is--just about--enough to damage ..read more
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Academic Publishing and Malpractice
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
1y ago
    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 excesses. He discussed arbitrary decision-making, failure to communicate the reasons for decisions, negligence, manuscripts with excessive time in review, unprofessional reviews and use of inappropriate reviewers. I agree with all of his observations. I have been an editor (and mostly an Editor-in-Chief) of major international journals for almost 38 years. During that time I have encountered all sor ..read more
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Can we stop the rot in academia?
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
1y ago
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 pervasive anxiety, to sullen resignation. Academics seem to be trapped in a spiral of worsening conditions, but many fear that if they seek a new position elsewhere, the situation there may be just the same as the one that induced them to move. Others, of course, are simply unable to move, stuck in a job with working conditions that are increasingly less tolerable. Standards of management are generally very ..read more
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Foresight
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
2y ago
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 strikes, these networks are capable of transmitting impacts through a variety of domains and system states, each of which produces different consequences. The cascade is a result of the progression of a shock through different kinds of vulnerability. To categorise these as social, economic, psychological, environmental, institutional, and so on is to oversimplify the mechanisms within them and the conne ..read more
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How Shall We Communicate Risk in an Era of ‘Manufactured Reality’?
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
2y ago
  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 flanked by a double row of plane trees and the other side is lined by a row of elegant palazzi. The street is paved with flagstones and parking is forbidden by law. My neighbour parks her car outside her front door every night.  She does so even though it is only 30 metres to a legitimate car park, there is a sign forbidding parking and the local police occasionally fine her. We have tried gently to rea ..read more
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Seeing and Hearing: Underrated Skills?
Disaster Planning and Emergency Management
by Professor David E. Alexander
2y ago
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 skills--that are at least as important as writing and speaking. Some would argue that they are even more important. Pierre Bonnard, the great post-Impressionist painter, said that “many people look, but few see”. How very true! It is one thing to receive a visual impression and quite another to interpret it. For those of us who are in London, a good exercise is to catch the no. 9 bus at Aldwych, go upstai ..read more
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