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Managing Emergencies: The Challenges of the Future

Emergency Planning

What does all this mean for Britain? If we look at major emergencies in the UK over the last 25 years or so, there have been significant deficiencies in the response in just about every case. The real problem is that the British emergency planning, management and response system is fragmented and incomplete.

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September is National Preparedness Month: Is Your Community Ready to Respond to a Severe Weather Event or Emergency?

National Fire Protection Association

Ready, a national public service campaign, has earmarked September as National Preparedness Month and urges those of us tasked with protecting people and property from fire, electrical, and related hazards, to work together, help educate, and empower the public to prepare for, respond to, and mitigate emergencies before they become tragedies.

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Reflections on the Turkish-Syrian Earthquakes of 6th February 2023: Building Collapse and its Consequences

Emergency Planning

How much simpler to attribute it all to anonymous forces within the ground! It was notable that, in many buildings that pancaked in Turkey and Syria, the collapses left almost no voids at all, thanks to the complete fragmentation of the entire structure. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 15: 931-945. Ecemis, S.Z.

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State of the Nation - a UK Perspective on Covid-19

Emergency Planning

Since the start of the crisis, I have constantly affirmed that the key to understanding the effects of this pandemic is the UK Government's failure to give adequate weight to emergency planning and management (Alexander 2020a, 2020b). Plans were made in the UK in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014. I have taught it every year since then.

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The 2019 Global Assessment Report (GAR)

Emergency Planning

I have argued elsewhere (Alexander 2017) that the number of times the word 'should' is used in an official document is an inverse indicator of its utility. It could be argued that political decision making is the greatest barrier of all to successful disaster risk reduction. The GAR notes that "we all live in communities".

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Disaster Risk Reduction is not a Paradigm

Emergency Planning

It lacks the spatial dimension of the 1960s work of the geographers Torsten Hägerstrand (1968) and his colleagues, but it has all the other components. 2017), but to answer the question properly, we have to ask another. Sadly, a follow-the-herd mentality all too easily develops among researchers. Paton 2017. perhaps not!)