Showing titles in Disaster Relief

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19 - its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it.

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned.

Events around the world continue to present challenges for first responders and mental health professionals. Natural and man-made disasters continue. Evidence mounts concerning potential events such as global warming and the effects this may have worldwide. Avian Flu remains a concern as do forms of biological terrorism and natural hazards such as tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. The 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and Thailand continues to have a significant impact on that area of the world. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to impact those countries, the Middle East and the ...

TIR offers an opportunity for the members of a CISM team to deal with any accumulated emotional baggage that their involvement in crisis-intervention has created. Training in TIR adds another tool to the toolkit of crisis-intervention techniques and enables peer-support to ad-dress an extended range of crisis-reactions, even those that might justify a clinical diagnosis. If virtually all the emotional reactions of a colleague in crisis could be accommodated and addressed through CISM and TIR, then the difference to the individual, the CISM team and the community would be immense. I look ...

This book provides information about training for mental health professionals and first responders who work with victims of disaster related stress and trauma. It helps prepare them to relate with disaster victims and co-workers. Warning signs and symptoms are explored together with stages, strategies and interventions for recovery. The book will introduce you to disasters, the community response, the roles of first responders, Disaster Mental Health Services and Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) responders and teams. It provides a brief overview of these and their roles in ...

Emergency preparedness goes beyond stockpiling; it's about a comprehensive plan and skill development. If you've never prepped before, this guide provides a clear roadmap to make daunting tasks manageable.

Have you ever imagined being caught in an unexpected emergency or stranded in the wilderness with no one to rely on but yourself? What if you had the knowledge and skills to not just survive but thrive in any situation? Survival Skills for Beginners is your definitive guide to navigating life’s most challenging moments. Packed with actionable insights, proven techniques, and practical advice, this comprehensive survival handbook will empower you to face the wild, prepare for emergencies, and build resilience for any crisis. What You’ll Learn in This Book Survival Fundamentals: ...

In an unpredictable world, taking charge of your own safety and well-being is no longer optional—it's essential. Emergency Preparedness Mastery leads you through the steps to build resilience, develop crucial survival skills, and prepare your household and community for any crisis that may come your way. This comprehensive guide is your key to transforming fear into confidence and chaos into opportunity. Begin your journey with a deep dive into self-reliance, understanding the core principles of resilience that will empower you and your family. Discover the mindset needed to overcome fear...

For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee,  burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and precipitating a cleanup effort that would cost more than a billion dollars—and the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released.

The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped America’s natural-disaster policies for the next century. The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It was the nation’s most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.

Disaster can come in many forms, from earthquakes and avalanches to catastrophic machine failure and acts of terror. And afterwards, when the dust settles and the survivors emerge, we can't help but wonder: why them? Why did they live when so many others perished? In The Unthinkable, Prize-winning journalist Amanda Ripley, who has covered some of the most devastating disasters of our age, sets out to find the answers.

A comprehensive catalog of the most devastating and deadly events-natural or man-made-in human history. If you follow the news it can seem like injury, sickness, and death are now constant, inescapable occurrences that threaten us every second of every day. But such catastrophic events - as terrible and frightening as they are - have been happening for as long as mankind has walked the Earth.... and even before. From ancient volcanoes and floods to epidemics of cholera and smallpox to Hitler's mass killings in the 20th century, humanity's continued existence has always seemed perilous.

As America stands at the precipice of famine, political instability, a financial disaster, domestic conflict, and even a civil war, preparing one’s home and family are now a matter of survival. Contrary to the popular belief that rural living will allow a prepared individual to ride out the storm unscathed, lessons from history show us that those outside of cities will face similar threats to their suburban compatriots. Rural and remote homesteads and properties can be easily attacked by a superior force utilizing the same isolation that the owner sought. Getting out of the cities is a ...

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

The western world is devolving into war, hyperinflation, and socio-political chaos making preparation for post-SHTF survival more fraught than ever for suburbanites. Not all of us are fortunate enough to live in rural areas or have bug-out cabins in remote mountains. The majority of the population will have to survive, and fight, where they are in cities big and small. Rather than give it up for lost, this book provides analysis of the uncertain urban world to come and how to navigate its dangers. Civil war is an unpleasant almost certainty. Average citizens will be called to take up the ...

In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry....