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Apprivoiser les catastrophes Pourquoi consacrer un numéro aux risques quand les publications se multiplient sur cette question ? Jocelyne DuboisMaury et Claude Chaline en particulier dressent un panorama quasi exhaustif de tous les risques naturels dont l'espace urbain est menacé, et des différentes mesures légales prévues pour l'en préserver. Mais qu'a voulu dire Ulrich Beck en parlant de « société du risque », et que cherchent à évoquer ceux qui comme Anthony Giddens en GrandeBretagne ou JeanPierre Dupuy en France lui ont emboîté le pas ? De grands corps d'ingénieurs, celui des Ponts et Chaussées et celui des Mines, ont évité aux Français depuis le XVIII e siècle de se poser ce genre de question. Le corps des Ponts et Chaussées s'est constitué pour entraver tout ce qui nuisait à la circulation des personnes et des marchandises, en utilisant la main d'oeuvre au chômage dans les campagnes. D'emblée il s'est mis en travers des risques d'atteinte à l'ordre public et c'est ce qui a fait son succès. Quant au corps des Mines il s'est distingué en calculant des machines qui diminuaient le risque d'accident tout en améliorant le rendement. Dès le Siècle des lumières l'État se constitue comme gestionnaire d'une « société du risque » où la prévention des aléas joue un rôle moteur dans l'amélioration des choses. De travaux en travaux cette amélioration devient tout à fait réelle. L'évolution de la norme est éclairante à ce sujet. C'est ainsi que la circulaire Caquot en 1949 invite à dimensionner les égouts de façon que la crue centennale soit avalée en une heure. Les égouts de Paris sont capables de cette performance. La construction des villes nouvelles est l'occasion de découvrir que cette norme, inappliquée par la plupart des villes de province, est inapplicable financièrement en ÎledeFrance également. Des solutions fort élégantes sont trouvées en allant chercher des i

Governing Disasters The Challenges of Emergency Risk Regulation Alberto Alemanno Edited by Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law and Risk Regulation, HEC Paris, France 2011 320 pp Hardback 978 0 85793 572 4 Hardback £75.00 on-line price £67.50 Qty This book is also available as an ebook  978 0 85793 573 1 from - www.EBSCOhost.com www.myilibrary www.ebooks.com www.ebookscorporation.com www.dawsonera.com www.ebrary.com/corp/ www.books.google.com/ebooks Description 'This comprehensive edited volume makes an important and much needed contribution to an increasingly important dimension of risk assessment and management, namely emergency risk regulation. Drawing upon the responses of government, businesses, and the public to the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland - which disrupted European air travel, it offers important lessons for policy-makers who are likely to confront similar unanticipated global risks. The recent nuclear power disaster in Japan makes this volume both timely and prescient.' - David Vogel, University of California, Berkeley, US Contents Contributors: A. Alemanno, N. Bernard, V. Brannigan, C.M. Briggs, M. Broberg, A. Burgess, G.G. Castellano, S. Chakraborty, A. Fioritto, F. Hansstein, L. Jachia, A. Jeunemaitre, C. Johnson, C. Lawless, F.B. López-Jurado, D. Macrae, M. Mazzocchi, V. Nikonov, M. Ragona, M. Simoncini, A.M. Viens Further information 'The challenges posed by risky decisions are well documented. These decisions become even more daunting when they must be made in a midst of a crisis. Using the European volcanic risk crisis as the principal case study, Alberto Alemanno and the other contributors to this thought provoking volume derive valuable lessons for how policy makers can cope with the attendant time pressures, uncertainties, coordination issues, and risk communication problems. Once the next emergency risk situation occurs, it may be too late to learn about how to respond. Governing Disasters should be re

The next catastrophe: reducing our vulnerabilities to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters Charles Perrow 3 Resenhas Princeton University Press, 2007 - 377 páginas Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. InThe Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us. The Next Catastropheis a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready?

he United States and other nations are facing large-scale risks at an accelerating pace. In 2005, three major hurricanes-Katrina, Rita, and Wilma-made landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast within an eight-week period. The damage caused by these storms led to insurance reimbursements and federal disaster relief of more than $180 billion-a record sum. Today we are more vulnerable to catastrophic losses because of the increasing concentration of population and activities in high-risk coastal regions of the country. The question is not whether but when future catastrophes will strike. Who should pay the costs associated with catastrophic losses suffered by homeowners in hazard-prone areas? In At War with the Weather, Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan and their colleagues deliver a groundbreaking analysis of how we currently mitigate, insure against, and finance recovery from natural disasters in the United States. They offer innovative, long-term solutions for reducing losses and providing financial support for disaster victims that define a coherent strategy to assure sustainable recovery from future large-scale disasters. The amount of data collected and analyzed and innovations proposed make this the most comprehensive book written on these critical issues in the past thirty years.

10 MAY 2010: ANALYSIS The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal oversight, complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm. by john mcquaid It's hard to believe now, as oil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on the Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President Obama announced a major push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama's commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic skill. But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice of offshore drilling have been turned upside down. Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd. The Gulf spill harks back to drilling disasters from decades past - including one off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three million gallons into coastal waters and led to the current moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic "low probability, high impact event" - the kind we've seen more than our share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there's a single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it's that pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception. Getty Images/U.S. Coast Guard Fire boats battle the fire on the oil rig Deepwater Horizon after the April 21 explosion. The post-mortems are only beginning, so the precise causes of the initial

From the oil spill to the financial crisis, why we don't plan for the worst Network News X PROFILE View More Activity TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz Reprints   COMMENT 50 Comments  |  View All »  COMMENTS ARE CLOSED WHO'S BLOGGING » Links to this article By Richard A. Posner Sunday, June 6, 2010 The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest of several recent disastrous events for which the country, or the world, was unprepared. Setting aside terrorist attacks, where the element of surprise is part of the plan, that still leaves the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 (and was aggravated by Greece's recent financial collapse) and the earthquake in Haiti in January. THIS STORY If it seems unthinkable, plan for it Why is BP's CEO still on the job? In all these cases, observers recognized the existence of catastrophic risk but deemed it to be small. Many other risks like this are lying in wait, whether a lethal flu epidemic, widespread extinctions, nuclear accidents, abrupt global warming that causes a sudden and catastrophic rise in sea levels, or a collision with an asteroid. Why are we so ill prepared for these disasters? It helps to consider an almost-forgotten case in which risks were identified, planned for and averted: the Y2K threat (or "millennium bug") of 1999. As the turn of the century approached, many feared that computers throughout the world would fail when the two-digit dates in their operating systems suddenly flipped from 99 to 00. The risk of disaster probably was quite small, but the fact that it had a specific and known date made it irrational to postpone any remedies -- it was act now or not at all. Such certainty about timing is rare; indeed, a key obstacle to taking preventive measures against unlikely disasters is precisely that they are unlikely to occur in the near future. Of course, if the consequences of the disaster would be very grave, t

Natural Hazards Center Publications Descriptions and links to publications of the Natural Hazards Center are provided below. In most cases, downloadable versions of the publications are available, along with archives of past publications. An updated PDF file listing all of the Natural Hazards Center Publications is available. For information on ordering hard copies of any publications, visit our publications purchasing page. Natural Hazards Observer The Natural Hazards Observer is the bimonthly periodical of the Natural Hazards Center. It covers current disaster issues; new international, national, and local disaster management, mitigation, and education programs; hazards research; political and policy developments; new information sources and Web sites; upcoming conferences; and recent publications. Disaster Research Disaster Research (DR) is a biweekly e-newsletter that includes some news items that also appear in the Natural Hazards Observer as well as other timely articles about new developments, policies, conference announcements, job vacancies, Web resources, and information sources in the field of hazards management. Quick Response Reports With funds contributed by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Hazards Center Quick Response program offers social scientists small grants to travel to the site of a disaster soon after it occurs to gather valuable information concerning immediate impact and response. Scholars participating in the program submit reports, which the Center makes available for free online. Research Digest Research Digest is a quarterly online publication that compiles recent research into an easily accessible format for the hazards and disasters community. It provides complete references and abstracts (when available) for current research in the field. The issues include more than 35 peer reviewed publications. Natural Hazards Review The Natural Hazards Review is a joint publication of the Natural Hazards Center and the American Societ

Managing disaster risk in emerging economies Alcira Kreimer, Margaret Arnold 0 Resenhas World Bank Publications, 2000 - 193 páginas In 1999 natural catastrophes and man-made disasters claimed more than 105,000 lives, 95 percent of them in the developing world, and caused economic losses of around US$100 billion. In 1998 the twin disasters of the Yangtze and Hurrican Mitch accounted for two-thirds of the US$65 billion loss. The geographical areas affected may vary, but one constant is that the per capita burden of catastrophic losses is dramatically higher in developing countries. To respond to an increased demand to assist disaster rcovery programmes, the World Bank set up the Disaster Management Facility in 1998, to help provide the Bank with a more rapid and strategic response to disaster emergencies. The DMF focuses on risk identification, risk reduction, and risk sharing/transfer, the three major topics in this volume. The DMF also promotes strategic alliances with key private, government, multilateral and nongovernmental organisations to ensure the inclusion of disaster risk reduction as a central value of development. The most important of these partnerships is the ProVention Consortium, launched in February 2000, based on the premise that we must all take responsibility for making the new millennium a safer one

Social Vulnerability to Disasters Brenda Phillips, Cheryl Childers, Alice Fothergill, Deborah Thomas 0 Resenhas CRC PR INC, 2009 - 406 páginas Standard emergency management training programs prepare for the effects of a disaster on a community. However, factors beyond logistics, such as understanding at-risk populations, can be critical in ensuring that a disaster does not become a catastrophe. Based on materials developed for the FEMA Higher Education Project, this book, designed for classroom use, explores how vulnerable social groups cope with hazardous events. The authors examine historical, geographical, social, and cultural factors that put people at risk, before, during, and after disasters. The text also offers strategies for community-based mitigation programs that engage those people most at risk.

Iran, BP and the CIA LAWRENCE S. WITTNER Counterpunch June 23, 2010 The offshore oil drilling catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico brought to us by BP has overshadowed its central role over the past century in fostering some other disastrous events. BP originated in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company-a British corporation whose name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company two decades later.  With exclusive rights to extract, refine, export, and sell Iran's rich oil resources, the company reaped enormous profits.  Meanwhile, it shared only a tiny fraction of the proceeds with the Iranian government.  Similarly, although the company's British personnel lived in great luxury, its Iranian laborers endured lives of squalor and privation. In 1947, as Iranian resentment grew at the giant oil company's practices, the Iranian parliament called upon the Shah, Iran's feudal potentate, to renegotiate the agreement with Anglo-Iranian.  Four years later, Mohammed Mossadeq, riding a tide of nationalism, became the nation's prime minister.  As an enthusiastic advocate of taking control of Iran's oil resources and using the profits from them to develop his deeply impoverished nation, Mossadeq signed legislation, passed unanimously by the country's parliament, to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British government was horrified.  Eager to assist the embattled corporation, it imposed an economic embargo on Iran and required its technicians to leave the country, thus effectively blocking the Iranian government from exporting its oil.  When this failed to bring the Iranians to heel, the British government sought to arrange for the overthrow of Mossadeq-first through its own efforts and, later (when Britain's diplomatic mission was expelled from Iran for its subversive activities), through the efforts of the U.S. government.  But President Truman refused to commit the CIA to this venture. To the delight of Anglo-Iranian, it received

In our time, the human species has acquired the capability to destroy both human life and much of the biosphere that hosts it. This potential is even more dangerous as the processes of globalization unfold, especially in their corporate and oligarchic modes, which contribute to increased poverty and environmental degradation. This situation makes the development of a new mode of reason necessary. In this article, I propose to analyze the discursive continuity between the Gaia hypothesis and ecofeminism as a space from where this alternative mode of reason is emerging. This alternative mode of reason, I claim, posits symbiosis rather than independence as the basic form of relatedness between individual entities. Symbiotic reason, I suggest, is exponentially feminine, for women's bodies are predisposed to be two-in-one-to be hosts to other bodies in pregnancy.[ 1] Symbiotic reason understands life as an interrelated web in which each individual is a small node that exists thanks to the others' presence. Life resembles a Deleuzian rhizome, a multiplicity of elements in a free-range order, with each element different from the next, yet all recognizably part of the whole.[ 2] If symbiosis is the axiom on which the new rational mode of thinking rests, then symbiotic reason is ecofeminist.[ 3] Ecofeminism, short for ecological feminism, emerged from a feminist interest in science - the area of knowledge that claims reason and rationality as its own turf. In the 1980s, feminist science studies exposed the white male perspective behind the alleged objectivity of Western science.[ 4] In the 1990s, ecofeminism evolved as a mode of feminist discourse concerned with ecological issues that Western science was unable to resolve.[ 5] While major agents of corporate globalization such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are accustomed to treating the Earth as assemblage of consumable resources, many ecofeminist philosophers are keenly aware that the Earth may ve

Although asbestos was once considered a miracle mineral, today even the word itself has ominous implications for all strata of our society. Incorporated in the past into over 3000 different industrial and consumer products, as well as in building materials and military equipment, opportunities for exposure continue to be ever present in our environment. Of all of us who are potentially exposed, blue collar workers are at greatest risk. Countless thousands of workers and servicemen in a wide variety of trades were disabled or have died consequent to the health effects of asbestos, and many more can be expected to be affected in years to come. Litigation continues, and financial awards in the billions have bankrupt many Fortune 500 companies and numerous smaller companies. While one might implicate our forefathers in this widespread, relentless medical catastrophe, it has been only in recent decades that science has appreciated the complexities of the problem and the long latencies before the asbestos-associated diseases appear clinically. After all these years, prevention remains the hallmark of disease control, as modern treatments remain, to a large extent, futile.

Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics May 27, 2010frankackermanLeave a commentGo to comments from Frank Ackerman Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department's Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren't there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you'd be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry's liability for oil spill damages.  Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada's politicians aren't looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you'd be happy to learn about a law limiting industry's liability for accidents, wouldn't you?  Environmentalists have long warned that the world could run out of energy and resources, from the "limits to growth" theories of the 1970s to the more recently popular notion of "peak oil." The response from economists has been that prices for energy and raw materials are still moderate, and declined over the course of the 20th century; if we are running out of something, why doesn't its price skyrocket? The problem is that what we're running out of is low-risk conventional energy supplies. Because our economy conceals and socializes energy risks, prices remain deceptively low for an increasingly risky energy supply. The market wasn't supposed to work this way. In the

Robert R. M. Verchick.  Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action fora Post-Katrina World.  Cambridge  Harvard University Press, 2010.  x+ 322 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04791-4. Reviewed by Thomas A. Birkland (North Carolina State University)Published on H-Environment (November, 2010)Commissioned by David T. Benac Environmental Policy, Ecosystem Function, and Disaster Mitigation:Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

you do not happen to be a disaster researcher or know the history of disaster research, you might not realize how unusual Catastrophe in the Making is. Disaster research has been a sociological specialty since the late-1940s, but the field has faced several challenges, particularly on a theoretical level. One challenge stems from the fact that the original funders of disaster research, which were primarily military and civil defense institutions at the federal level, were not particularly interested in theory. Rather, they were interested in solid empirical research about social and organizational responses during disasters that could provide practical insights into how people might behave should the United States become involved in an extreme nuclear confrontation or all-out nuclear war. This focus in turn led to another problematic outcome, which is that researchers conceptualized and studied disasters primarily as events-as occurrences that were, in the words of the pioneering researcher Charles Fritz, "concentrated in time and space." Put another way, early social science researchers thought about disasters in more or less the way the general public did: as events that have a beginning, middle, and end, with the "beginning" of the disaster being the time when the disaster "agent"-the flood, earthquake, hurricane, fire, or other threat-appears on the scene and begins to threaten human communities. Most research has focused on such topics as responses to pre-disaster warnings; patterns of social behavior during the period following disaster impact; organizational adaptation and improvisation during disasters; and the disaster response activities of specific types of organizations and institutions. There has also been an emphasis on developing empirical generalizations and insights on the basis of the study of specific disasters, which subsequently developed in an incremental fashion into a body of empirical findings. This is not to claim that th

About the Deepwater Horizon Study Group   The Deepwater Horizon Study Group was formed by members of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) in May 2010  in response to the explosion and fire at British Petroleum's Deepwater  Horizon well on April 20, 2010.  CCRM is a group of academic researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines who attempt to share their knowledge of safety, organizational reliability and the mitigation of adverse human and natural events.   CCRM researchers have laudable expertise in engineering, law, the offshore petroleum industry, accident investigation, protection of sensitive environments, and in organizational management for dangerous environments.  Prompted by inquiries from industries, government agencies, the news media, and concerned individuals around the world regarding the causes and possible remediation of the oil spill at Deepwater Horizon, CCRM members organized the Deepwater Horizon Study Group (DHSG) to consider ways they might help to mitigate the effects of this incident.  DHSG is comprised of faculty members from the University of California and other institutions, accident investigators, petroleum engineers, social scientists, environmental advocates, and directors of research centers. DHSG members identified critical goals for the better understanding and prevention or mitigation of future accidents.  The first goal of DHSG is to capture facts and observations from workers, managers, witnesses, regulatory agencies, and other sources that may be lost if not gathered and preserved immediately.   An archive for this evidence will be established and accessible to interested researchers and investigators.  DHSG will produce its own in-progress reports and analyses of this incident from these data.  Finally, DHSG will attempt to disseminate the results of its inquiry and analysis to the public, to national and local governments, to industries that must operate in potentially dangerous environ

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