natural disasters
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Can Fracking Cause Bigger, More Frequent Earthquakes?
Injecting fluids into the Earth, whether to recover natural gas or to obtain thermal energy from the planet, can cause earthquakes. New reports that look at American fracking, deep waste-water injection, and geothermal activities suggest there are big risks and thus a need to develop strong regulatory framework to deal with them. Read More »
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CDC Official Protests Federal Medical Response Cuts
More than half a decade of reductions to spending on state and local public-health agencies has already been "extremely damaging" to capabilities across the country for responding to unconventional attacks and other disasters, Dr. Ali Khan, director of the Public Health Preparedness and Response Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Security Newswire in an interview.
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Christians Beat FEMA, and in So Doing, Tame Big Government
Faith-based groups — Christian nonprofits, specifically — have been busy bees of late, providing more aid to hurricane victims than even FEMA, the federal agency that’s supposed to swoop to the scenes of natural disasters, assess the situation and speed the recovery and rebuilding process. Just goes to show: Where charity exists, government is not needed. Look at this, from the Daily Caller: “Faith-based relief groups are responsible for providing nearly 80 percent of the aid delivered thus far to communities with homes devastated by the recent hurricanes”...
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Condom Airborne Meds: 6 Ways Drones Could Change Health Care
Drones have been used to deliver sunscreen to a conference in Palm Springs, Calif., and pizza to a family in New Zealand, but they’re also in the air for far more urgent purposes — such as saving lives. In fact, in some cases, drones could carry defibrillators to heart attack victims faster than an ambulance, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers simulated emergency situations and found they could get automatic external defibrillators to the scene an average of 16 minutes faster by drone than by ambulance...
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Creating a High-Speed Internet Lane for Emergency Situations
During large disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires and terrorist attacks, people want emergency responders to arrive quickly and help people deal with the crisis. In order to do their best, police, medics, firefighters and those who manage them need lots of information: Who is located where, needing what help? And what equipment and which rescuers are available to intervene? With all of the technology we have, it might seem that gathering and sharing lots of information would be pretty simple. But communicating through a disaster is much more challenging than it appears...
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Crisis Maps: Harnessing The Power Of Big Data To Deliver Humanitarian Assistance
Crisis-mapping technology has emerged in the past five years as a tool to help humanitarian organizations deliver assistance to victims of civil conflicts and natural disasters. Crisis-mapping platforms display eyewitness reports submitted via e-mail, text message, and social media. Read More »
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Crossing Boundaries By Tracing Buildings: Mapping Kathmandu From New York City"
Throughout the day you could hear the simple question - 'Is that a building?' -- followed by conversations about shadows, and people, and the construction of a city that seemed so far away from our own... Read More »
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Crowd-Funding Draws Donations For Sandy Relief
In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, some who lost their homes or businesses have turned to crowd-funding websites to elicit a faster and more direct response than they could expect from the government or traditional charities. Read More »
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Developers from 156 Nations Work on Open Source Apps to Help Victims of Natural Disasters. Project OWL Wins 'Call for Code Global Prize'
With the global reach and vision of Call for Code Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, and Charitable Partners United Nation Human Rights and The American Red Cross, the largest engagement of developers in history culminated with the Call for Code Global Prize winners and finalists being celebrated last night during a gala event globally broadcast from The Regency Ballroom in San Francisco. Knowing that people suffer when communications are destroyed when natural disasters strike, Project OWL is an innovative software/hardware solution that includes an offline communication infrastructure, providing first responders with a simple experience for managing all aspects of disaster response.
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Disaster-Mapping Project Helps Spread Reports Of The Czech Floods
The Krizová mapa Česka, or Crisis Map Czech, an online disaster-mapping project created by a Czech television channel, has provided Czech citizens with up-to-date information about the flooding in the Czech Republic. Read More »
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DoD Looks for Disaster Response Solutions Through Artificial Intelligence Innovation Competition
An important new trend in the federal sector involves the use of "innovation competitions" to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for major problems that the agencies face. An ongoing AI innovation competition from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), known as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Outcomes Challenge began in March 2019. While that competition is only open to major consulting firms, the Department of Defense (DoD) was the trendsetter here and has been working on a series of AI competitions that began with the xView competition in March 2018.
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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...
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Drones and the Future of Disaster Response
Four continental states and one U.S. territory took a beating this fall as one natural disaster after another rocked communities in Northern California and along the Gulf Coast, spreading disaster relief resources and personnel thin as federal, state, and local governments scrabbled to address the crises. Wildfires in California's wine country claimed at least 42 lives, 8,400 structures, and 245,000 acres of land in October. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma pummeled Louisiana, Texas, and Florida only to be followed by Hurricane Maria, which slammed Puerto Rico on September 20 and left much of the U.S. territory without communications systems, electricity, clean water, or functioning hospitals....
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Drones Spread Wings From War Zones To Disaster Areas
While lawmakers around the world struggle to keep up with the growth in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — commonly known as drones — innovation and community participation are changing how this weapon of modern warfare can be used for humanitarian purposes. Read More »
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Earthquake Could Cause Los Alamos Plutonium Facility To Collapse
An earthquake could collapse the building at Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., where plutonium cores of nuclear bombs are produced, releasing deadly doses of radiation, the Department of Energy’s inspector general reported on Thursday Read More »
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