• The Evolution of U.S. Emergency Risk Assessment and Response

    The U.S. emergency management system evolved from responses to many past situations, including the Great Depression and the Cold War. The current system formed as a seeming patchwork of federal, local, nonprofit and other agencies. While the current system has advantages and weaknesses, understanding its makeup can help us address current crises, including pandemics and climate change.

  • Improving Florida’s Hurricane Resilience: Alternative Fuel Vehicles, Infrastructure

    When events like tropical storms or other unforeseen crises disrupt a state’s primary supply of gasoline and diesel, emergency fleet efforts can become hampered as access to fuel is restricted or completely unavailable.

  • How the Terrifying Evacuations from the Twin Towers on 9/11 Helped Make Today's Skyscrapers Safer

    One legacy of the 9/11 tragedy and the harrowing experience of those who successfully escaped the Twin Towers – the disaster was the most significant high-rise evacuation in modern times —  is that today’s skyscrapers can be emptied much more safely and easily in an emergency.

  • 9/11 Prepared Firms for COVID-19 Economic Effects

    Companies which experienced the financial impact of 9/11 were more resilient to the economic effects of COVID-19, according to new research.The research is the first of its kind to compare the events of the last eighteen months with 9/11.

  • Securing Domestic Supply Chain of Critical Materials

    DOE announced $30 million in funding for 13 national lab and university-led research projects to develop new technologies that will help secure the supply of critical materials that build clean energy technologies.

  • Flood control: Seeking Community-Driven Answers to Living with Flooding

    Researchers have used a localized flooding event to envision how human beings can live with the threat of water invading their living and working spaces.

  • Small Towns Should Focus on Resilience

    With heatwaves, bushfires, and floods, small towns and their surrounding communities have confronted a combination of successive disasters fueled by climate change. And it’s predicted to only get worse. “So, the challenge for all of us, but particularly areas at increasing risk of climate-fueled disasters, is to get ahead of what’s coming,” says one expert. “We need to ask: what we can do to reduce or even prevent some of these disasters from happening?”

  • How Have Communities Been Faring During COVID-19? And How Will Lessons Learned Inform Future Response and Planning?

    Now may be a good time to examine the choices communities made during the last year to see how these approaches shape continued COVID-19 response and recovery and help build resilience for future pandemic response.

  • New Thinking to Translate Infrastructure Dollars into Resilience

    America’s roads, bridges and other public resources and services appear to be suffering from a chronic resilience deficit, and recent cyberattacks appear to reflect gaps in resilience. All these underscore the fact that much of the nation’s infrastructure was built under the assumptions of the past and apparently false expectations about the risks of the future. Rapid changes in infrastructure as well as the threats to which it is exposed are creating new challenges for resilience.

  • Better Earthquake Recovery

    For the last century, seismic building codes and practices have primarily focused on saving lives by reducing the likelihood of significant damage or structural collapse. Recovery of critical functions provided by buildings and infrastructure have received less attention, however. As a result, many remain vulnerable to being knocked out of service by an earthquake for months, years or for good. A new report outlines seven recommendations that, if acted upon, may greatly improve the resilience of communities across the nation.

  • New Lessons from the Worst Oil Spill Disaster ever

    Ten years ago, the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven men and resulted in the largest accidental oil spill in history. Years of investigations concluded that the drilling crew missed critical warning signals that would have stopped the problem. A new analysis suggests that wasn’t the case.

  • Needed: A New Approach to U.K. Resilience

    Experts are calling for a new approach to U.K. resilience. They believe that as well as lessons learnt from the response to COVID-19 there is a much wider lesson to be learnt about how the U.K. identifies, prepares and responds to threats and risks, such as to our safety, our national security and from climate change.

  • Hurricanes: From Resilience to Adaptation

    Natural disasters are getting worse. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 have been historic: in each of those years, the average number of disasters costing at least $1 billion was more than double the long-term average. As the number and cost of disasters continue to increase, communities are looking for ways to adapt and become more resilient.

  • It’s Time to Admit Our COVID-19 “Exit Strategy” Might Just Look Like a More Flexible Version of Lockdown

    As the COVID-19 curve starts to flatten in Australia and New Zealand, people are rightly wondering how we will roll back current lockdown policies. Australia’s federal health minister Greg Hunt says Australia is looking to South Korea, Japan and Singapore to inform our exit strategy. New Zealand is relaxing some measures from next week.Toby Phillips writes in The Conversation that a long-term solution – a vaccine – is many months, probably years, away. In the meantime, we must rely on social distancing policies to contain the epidemic – and begin to accept the idea that an “exit strategy” may really look more like a more flexible version of lockdown.

  • International Air Travel as an Indicator of COVID-19 Economic Recovery

    It seems likely that routine international air travel may not resume until the end of June at the earliest. Paul Rozenzweig writes that that, more than President Trump’s wishful thinking, is a true indicator of what economic recovery will look like. As any good student of law and economics would say, the best indicator of commercial expectations can be found in commercial enterprises—the market signals that indicate what businesses truly anticipate. And if any enterprise is likely to be a leading indicator of economic expectations, it seems that the airline industry is a good candidate.