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I'm interested in better understanding the ongoing geological processes that shape St. Louis and the Mississippi Valley region. So far, I've been looking into the history of seismicity in the region, focusing on the fascinating but little known history of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 -- the most devastating earthquakes to have hit the US east of the Rockies. I've also been exploring how St. Louis and surrounding areas are dealing with the possibility of another earthquake occurring in the future. According to one article I read, one of the biggest uncertainties is what would happen to the heavily engineered Mississippi River in the case of another major tremblor. The shaking could break the levees, flooding wide areas along the river and creating cascading effects. The flow of the river might also reverse completely, as occurred during the New Madrid earthquakes.

On these possibilities and the lack of scientific consensus surrounding intraplate seismicity in this zone, see this article in The Atlantic.

On current efforts to create earthquake hazard maps in St. Louis, see this overview on the US Geological Survey site.

For a deeper dive into the history of the New Madrid earthquakes, see this book by historian of science Conevery Bolton Valencius. 

The most compelling part of the film for me was the woman yelling at the side of the road about a pregnant woman that was sick and left behind by emergency responders that did not have the authority or equipment to handle the ebola patient. The fetus was still alive and moving, however, the ebola team came too late and the baby died along with its mother. This was compelling because it showed her dead on the side of the road and the woman screaming watched it happen. The baby could have been saved, but the understaffed ebola team could not get there in time. 

This organizations aims to provide a support system for returning veterans, more specifically to ensure access to any type of medical support they may need and assist them in readapting to society after extended periods of time in the military.

Policy makers, mostly. People who are privileged and can go to private doctors or hospitals don't often see the issues that public hospitals face. Policy makers who don't see this as a problem would benefit from seeing this documentary. But I think that everyone can learn smething from this documentary. For future doctors it can show patient care and bed-side manners. For a regular person it can show the need for insurance so that they can push local policy makers to make a change.

Emergency response is addressed both in terms of immediate response to a disaster as well as the long-term care needed to help those displaced or otherwise effected. The initial response to the reactor overload failed to prevent the disaster, and there is some debate as to if the efforts to control the exploding reactor actually increased the amount of radiation dispersed into the air. While attempting to mitigate the disaster workers were exposed to even more radiation than the initial explosion released. This event shows the importance of expertise in response to a disaster, this was the first nuclear disaster of this scale and no one knew how to respond. The majority of the paper focuses on the challenges of caring for hundreds of thousands of individuals when their need will extend for decades if not longer. The authors indicates that the system put in place provides the necessary assistance but only to those with the ability and knowledge to work within the system for their own advantage, and in the long-term it is slowly loosing support from the general society as the Chernobyl explosions falls further into history.

The author Sonja D. Schmid is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, she has expertise in the history of national energy policies looking at the risk associated with the nuclear industry. She has written several papers on the Soviet nuclear industry as well as policies and political controversies surrounding the nuclear industry and its potential military uses. 

This article has been used as a reference in other STS articles and books. 

Emergency response is not addressed in this article however it does provide emergency responders with insight into the stories those suffering from illness will have to explain their suffering. As emergency responders will often be working in societies and cultures very different form their own in the case of disaster response, it is important to understand that what may seem like fiction in a story cannot be dismissed without considering the deeper cultural significance of those elaborations.

This report was written using the transcript of the Committees’ sixtieth session, it was then presented to the United Nations General Assembly and published by the United Nations. The scientific papers included in the report were later submitted for publication in scientific journals. The report itself was used as an informative reference for the General Assembly when considering changes to the nuclear industry policies. 

While this chapter does not discuss emergency response, its approach to discussing the public health aspects of immigrants and French policies created a discussion about how immigrants and others seeking asylum for various reasons should be treated. The focus of this chapter is more on the public health side of society and the humanitarian side of immigration.