St. Louis Anthropocene: displacement & replacement
JJPA brief essay about St. Louis' notorious eminent domain history--
--along with 2 recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles about "urban renewal" projects that are scheduled to reoccupy the Mill Flats area, which hosted the most notorious episode of displacement of African-American communities: the Chouteau Greenway project (will it serve or displace low-income St. Louisans?); and SLU's Mill Creek Flats high-rise project, which certainly will, and whose name seems to me an especially tone-deaf if gutsy move...
https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/Margaret-Garb-St-Louis-Eminent-Domain
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seanw146I found the part where the healthcare worker relates to the difficulty of his position most compelling and persuasive. A man on the burial team talks about some of the challenges he faced. He says that they are in denial about the disease. For example, a man’s wife died from the disease. They took the body and marked the room with the health tattoo, do not enter and barricaded the door. A health team was tasked to disinfect the building but the moment they left the husband bust the door down and went inside. He died as well. “You see the challenges? You tell people, don’t do this, they pass behind you go do it, don’t do this, they say we are eating free money, the government is lying”.
I was probably influenced by the fact that I am a healthcare worker and while not the same situation, I can relate to his dilemma.
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seanw146Dr. Knowles points out the structural failures of the World Trade Center due to steel beams and poor fireproofing material. Dr. Knowles connects the burning of the Capitol Building in 1814, the 1850 Hague Street boiler explosion in NYC, and Chicago’s Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903 to convey the different aspects of a structural disaster. The Capital Building focused on the investigation, the importance of the sentimental value of the building, and rebuild it as well as the difficulties involved with doing so. The Hague Street Explosion investigation attempted to pinpoint the root cause of the disaster, but after thorough investigation there were many failures at many different levels which led to the ultimate failure. The Iroquois theater fire revealed issues with public policy, regulation compliance, and public perception in addition to its investigation.
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seanw1461) “The logic of state soverignty in the control of migration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life.”
2) “By analogy with the therapeutic mesasures applied at the end of life for patients suffering from illness deemed incurable, we can describe the measures and procedures devised to allow foreign patients without residence rights to stay in France, receive treatment, and have their living costs paid, as a compassion protocol.”
3) “Precisely because he or she is illegally resident, the sick immigrant may undertake medical tests or seek treatment under a different name, so that the cost of treatment is coverd, or simply to avoid being denounced and deported.”
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seanw1461) Personal trauma: this includes not only the direct, immediate effects of the disaster but also the long-term mental and physical effects from the disaster.
2) Way of life disrupted “disaster capitalism”: the next part of the syndrome includes business taking advantage of the situation for profits; the main case being private companies profiting off of federal funding to rebuild the homes and lives of the citizens who were affected.
3) Displacement: the well-off are able to relocated after the disaster has ended but for those less fortunate, there permanent effects are worse, and there is little they can do to relocated to their homes and communities after the superficial aspect of the disaster have ended.
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seanw146The assessments that patients take are not visible to the public so I can not elaborate on it. This is what is quoted from the company’s website about the “Easy Clinical Screenings”:
“Patients take digital, gamified mental health assessments conveniently on their mobile device to learn their actual diagnosis and become more self aware. Providers can deploy customized assessment questions specific to each patient. Patients can see their charted progress over time. Assessments are reimbursable by insurers.”
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seanw1461) The effects from the initial accident are recounted from the past history.
2) The healthcare system that deals with treating these patients are investigated.
3) The politics revolving around the first and second arguments form the third way that the author supports their argument.
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seanw1461) “Mismanagement was not the only charge mounted against the Japanese Utility that operated the reactors at Fukushima Diichi, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). In the aftermath of the disaster, international media charged workers at the plant, alternatingly, with a lack of expertise to handle the situation adequately, and with a lack of courage, when they retreated temporarily under the threat of dangerously high radiation levels.”
2) “But emergency preparedness is hardly ever considered ‘good enough’ in retrospect, especially after a disaster in which so many lives were lost or shattered.”
3) “Within the nuclear industry, an almost exclusive emphasis on accident avoidance has given way to a new strategy of accident preparedness and response.”
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seanw146The author conducted his research by personal experience and reference to case examples.
World War II's Manhattan Project required the refinement of massive amounts of uranium, and St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Works took on the job.