disaster
riskcrisis MANAGE RISK
First it is salient to highlight the physical impacts of a flooding event: You had to keep looking at the picture postcards to remind yourself what it used to be like. There were no buildings now where centuries-old homes had once stood. No trees where there used to be shade from the summer sun, nor any sound from the shops that once bustled with activity .. And no happy holidaymakers now, not a single one, only an army of rescue workers picking methodically through teetering wreckage. (Harris, 2004) This newspaper quote describes a journalist’s interpretation of the picture that met him as he arrived in the village just a few days after the floods in Boscastle in 2004. It conveys some sense of the damage and loss felt by a community after it has experienced floods.
Work by Disaster Sociologists such as Dr Anne Eyre and Kai Erikson illustrate just how traumatic any sort of sudden event that affects people on both individual levels and as a community (or as a member of ‘several communities’) can be (see Eyre, 2006, and Erikson, 1994). This discussion also reacquaints us with different definitions of disaster and different definitions of trauma: concepts and legal arguments around aspects of disaster management such as post-traumatic stress disorder place great emphasis on events that involve confrontation with serious injury or death (e.g. see the discussions within Adamou and Hale, 2003) whereas events such as floods may be perceived as ‘less traumatic’. The statistics from areas such as Hull indicate the human story within. According to Coulthard et al. (2007) 2,681 households were displaced from their homes and over 1,400 people ended up living in caravans. In some cases this was for over a year. This means families, elderly, pets, all living in temporary homes, in some cases taken away from their existing support networks, while their own places of safety are dried out and rebuilt. Convery defines the health and social impacts of a flooding event in more detail: The potential health and social impacts of flooding range from immediate death, injury and harm from contaminated water, through to detrimental longer term health and social impacts caused by damaged homes, loss of possessions, financial worries, forced moves into temporary accommodation and fear of vacant homes being burgled.
EMERGENCY
MSC IN EMERGENCY PLANNING MANAGEMENT
Arguably, during the aftermath of environmental hazards such as flooding, the impacts on people have not always been fully considered. Responders may tend to think in terms of a hierarchy of traumatic events and subconsciously will rate events like air crashes or bombings as being ‘different’ and ‘more serious’ in terms of their potential to cause trauma. This discussion reacquaints us with key themes from modules one and two: particularly concepts of quantitative risk assessment focussing on physical impacts rather than harder-to-define psycho-social consequences. There is also the historical perspective on emergency management where the focus was on saving life and limb: survivors are ‘lucky to be alive’ and therefore the loss of homes or personal effects may appear insignificant in the bigger picture.
PLANN NG
DISASTER
(Convery, 2008: 4) Understanding these potential impacts is the responsibility of emergency responders and coupled with them are a number of concepts that come into play in disaster. These are discussed in the next section.
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