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 I researched more into why the fire department’s Radios were having difficulties and issues, especially on the higher floors. First, the agency primarily used VHF (very high frequency) radios which are better for long distance when there is line-of-sight form point-to-point with minimal obstructions. UHF operates on a higher frequency and thus transmits with shorter wave-lengths which is better for object penetration. There are many challenges with radio communications in a city like NYC, starting with the sheer fact that to transmit directly from the ground to the top requires going through over a hundred stories of steel and concrete.

The repeaters worked to an extent. We know that they were operational and working, at least partly, as they recorded the relayed transmissions. The police used a separate but almost identical repeater as the fire department with mostly success. The NYFD experienced more issues. I found reports that claimed from fire fighters in the towers that while the transmissions were getting through, they were not understood due to the loud working environment and congested radio traffic.

The Incident Command System was largely ineffective. The only agency that was properly trained in ICS was the fire department which made inter-agency command and control through ICS moot. It was because of the events on 9/11/2001 that resulted in the development of the Nation Incident Management System, by the Department of Homeland Security, which encompasses ICS and more. Federal funding for emergencies now requires that NIMS be used as well as all first responders that respond to hazardous materials incidents be trained in the ICS.

The film is mostly about general people in the healthcare system. It takes place at one particular hospital but the cases could all easily take place anywhere. The struggles of the doctors, nurses, staff, patients, and families are applicable anywhere in th ecountry with our less than optimal healthcare system, there is so much more managerial stress on everyone than just making people healthy.

Didier Fassin—

“Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, illuminating important dimensions of the AIDS epidemic, mortality disparities, and global health. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action as well as in the making of international relations with humanitarianism. He recently conducted an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing as well as the justice and prison systems in France. His current work is on punishment, asylum, inequality, and the politics of life, and he is developing a reflection on the public presence of the social sciences. He occasionally writes for the French newspapers Le Monde and Libération. His recent books include The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (2015), and Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016).” (https://www.ias.edu/scholars/fassin)

"History shows that, with time, a given community of engineers and scientists has generally proven able to explain the technical particulars of a structural collapse. Yet, the demands placed in an investigation have as much, or more, to do with defining the dominant investigator and quickly addressing the fears and anger of the press, government, and an outraged public than they do with discovering the defiinintive technical truths of a catastrophic event."

"Steam power...utterly transformed American economic and social life in the 19th century. With this promising technology, though, arrived a whole series of risks, catastrophic boiler explosions being the most dramatic, and the deadliest."

“Based upon research that the DRLA leadership has conducted with reputational leaders in the field, including leaders from within other premier academic institutions, international organizations, prestigious NGOs, the United Nations, the donor community, think tanks and the Red Cross movement, it is widely agreed that a systematic and interdisciplinary approach to leadership is widely needed in the community and insufficiently addressed in most academic programs. As Tulane University itself has exhibited such resilience and strength of leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it represents and ideal setting to support such an approach to disaster resilience leadership education and allows students to experience the living laboratory of recovery and resilience that is the city of New Orleans.” -- Louisiana Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters.

The entire video was very compelling.

The website and mobile app are the primary methods of engagement. 

Many studies look at intimate partner voilence (IPV), but only two previous studies look at it specifically related to a natural disaster, so this research is inventive in that way. It uses data from a larger study of the area that was hit by Katrina. The data was obtained through interviews, and in the period of time 6 months before Katrina to 6 months after, measures of psychological and physical IPV are analyzed. These measures were also compared to a scale of how stressful the individual's life had been in that time frame, which was reached based on answers to questions about how Katrina affected the individual.

1) I did more research into our role and mental health in the EMS system as EMTs. I found this article to be particularly insightful: Managing Psychiatric Emergencies (http://www.emsworld.com/article/10931747/managing-psychiatric-emergencies).

2) Bettering and improving EMS care by bypassing EDs and transporting patients to mental hospitals.

(http://epmonthly.com/article/pilot-project-trains-ems-to-bypass-the-ed-with-mental-health-patients/)

3) Learned about FEMAs policies and programs for mental health following a disaster in the U.S. (https://www.fema.gov/recovery-directorate/crisis-counseling-assistance-training-program)

The author of this article is Sonja D. Schmid. Sonja has degrees in science, technology and society (STS) as well as experience in organizational theory, disaster social issues, and studied risk in relation to different societies and cultures throughout the world.