On the morning of 7 February 2021 a mass of rock and glacier ice broke off a steep face below Ronti Peak in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand, India, fell roughly 1,800 meters, and turned into a fast, dirty flow that ran down the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga rivers. It destroyed one operating... [...]
On the night of 13 November 1985 Nevado del Ruiz erupted, and roughly two and a half hours later a wall of hot mud and rock came down the Lagunillas valley and buried the town of Armero, Colombia. Commonly published death tolls run from about 21,000 to 25,000, with the [...]
On the night of 8 October 1871 a fire started in or near a barn behind a small house on Chicago's West Side and, over roughly thirty hours, burned a strip of the city about four miles long. The story most people know, that a cow kicked over a lantern, [...]
A cobalt-60 teletherapy source that had sat unused in storage in Ciudad Juarez was broken open in late 1983, and thousands of small radioactive pellets went into a scrapyard, then into foundries, then into rebar and table bases that shipped across Mexico and into the United States. Nobody... [...]
On the night of 9 October 1963 an enormous mass of rock slid off the flank of Monte Toc into the Vajont reservoir in the Italian Alps. The displaced water went over the crest of one of the tallest dams in the world, a dam that did not break, and [...]
In September 1666 a fire that started in a bakehouse burned the greater part of the City of London. The tactics available were buckets, hooks and gunpowder. The decision that mattered most was made hours late, by a man worried about who would pay for the houses he was being [...]
On the morning of August 26, 2026, a wall of water, ice, mud and rock traveled down the Trishuli river system along the Nepal and Tibet border and destroyed settlements across roughly 72 kilometers of valley. Hundreds are dead, well over a thousand are missing, and the numbers are still [...]
Response is measured in days and recovery is measured in years. That single sentence explains most of what goes wrong after a disaster. The cameras leave, the mutual aid units go home, the emergency operations center stands down, and the community is left with the actual work: rebuilding housing, restoring [...]
Opening a shelter is the part of emergency management the public thinks it understands. Cots go in a gym, people arrive, somebody serves food. The reality is a staffing problem, a medical problem, a legal problem, and a logistics problem happening at once, usually at night, usually with less notice [...]
Whole community is one of those phrases that shows up in every plan and changes almost nothing about how the plan gets written. It is supposed to mean that emergency management works with the people who are actually in the jurisdiction, including the ones who cannot drive themselves out, cannot [...]
