For more than three decades, a chemical plant in Minamata, Japan, discharged wastewater carrying methylmercury into Minamata Bay and later into the wider Shiranui Sea. The mercury built up in the fish that coastal families ate every day. The poisoning that followed had no explosion, no release... [...]
Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The response plan written for that kind of spill described equipment and timelines that the people on scene could not deliver that night. That gap between a plan on [...]
Most emergency operations plans in the United States share one design. A basic plan sits up front, functional annexes for communications, warning, evacuation and sheltering follow it, and hazard-specific appendices come last. That design was a doctrinal choice made at the end of the 1970s, after... [...]
The accident at Three Mile Island Unit 2 in March 1979 released little radiation to the public, and no death or illness has been confirmed as caused by that radiation. The emergency response around it went badly in ways that still shape planning. Over several days the utility, the Nuclear... [...]
The Incident Command System taught in every ICS-100 course did not come from FEMA, and it was not invented after September 11, 2001. California fire agencies and the U.S. Forest Service built it in the 1970s, after a run of Southern California wildfires in the fall of 1970 showed that [...]
On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam failed above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The flood that followed killed 2,209 people, the count the National Park Service publishes. The dam belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Its members had lowered the crest and fitted screens... [...]
The hurricane that came ashore at Galveston, Texas on the night of September 8, 1900 is described by NOAA as the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. The number it killed is still published as a range rather than a figure. The city had several things a modern planner [...]
The World Trade Center site was worked around the clock from September 11, 2001 until a ceremony on May 30, 2002 closed the operation, which CNN described that day as eight months and nineteen days of work and 108,342 truckloads of debris. The people who worked there after the first [...]
A volcano observatory has two jobs during a crisis that pull in different directions, because it has to describe what the instruments show honestly while knowing that the words it chooses will move airline schedules, hotel bookings, property values and possibly tens of thousands of people out of... [...]
Hospitals across the New York region spent the morning of September 11, 2001 preparing for a casualty load that mostly did not arrive. Emergency departments near the World Trade Center took a rush of ambulatory patients in the first two or three hours and then saw the flow stop, because [...]
