Showing titles in Disaster Relief

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.

How does a person who lives in a wood framed house in the suburbs survive a nuclear war, especially if they don’t have a basement? Turns out, the crazy advice to get into the interior rooms of your house and shelter underneath the mattress isn’t so nuts after all. You don’t need a fallout shelter to survive and you may only have to stay inside to avoid lethal radiation poisoning. How is this possible? A highly overlooked defense against radiation is distance. Basically, if you can get inside away from the radiation outside, the dose you will be exposed to will be around half. This is ...

Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before.

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 ...

Pandemic, climate change, or war: Our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse, archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change.

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.

Rescue of the Bounty is the harrowing story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty - the tall ship used in the classic 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty - which was caught in the path of Hurricane Sandy with 16 aboard.

For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the long quiescent volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died, including newlywed logger John Killian (for years afterward, his father searched for him in the ash), scientist Dave Johnston, and celebrated local curmudgeon Harry Truman. The lives of many others were forever changed.

In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, The New York Times best-selling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a just recovery.

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.

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.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation's eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history.

On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with barely a trace, carrying 239 people onboard - seemingly vanishing into the dark night. The airplane's whereabouts and fate would quickly become one of the biggest aviation mysteries of our time....

The clock is ticking. Inflation continues to rise, the political divide widens, and social unrest threatens us all. The end of America, as we know it, looms. Will you be ready for the collapse? Or will you be one of the many unprepared masses, desperate and vulnerable? In Sold Out Forever, you'll discover 101 essential items you must have now to ensure your survival in a post-collapse world. From the best foods to stockpile to medical supplies and self-defense gear, this comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you cannot be without. Imagine being one of the few who prepared ...

Much of New Orleans still sat underwater the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see.

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.

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

America has entered a time when civil disturbances, unrest, and mobs threaten near-anarchy on the streets of suburbia as police are unwilling or unable to protect citizens from rioters. Our nation has entered a time where it is divided in a way we haven’t seen since 1861. We are on the verge of a civil war. This book isn’t to convince you we are at that point or how we got there; this book is to give you ideas on how to protect yourself, your home, and your neighborhood when evil threatens and the police cannot protect you. Many prepper and survivalist manuals give up suburbia as lost, ...

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.