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Combo Disaster and Environmental Injustice

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Join us for the Disaster STS Network’s Fall 2021 virtual tour of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, a corridor of chemical plants along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with shockin

Seismic St. Louis

Emily Sekine
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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. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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This film is meant to show the struggles of an ER waiting room from all sides. It shows the frustrations of patients waiting to be seen for hours, financial workers, social workers, and doctors struggling to see everyone in a timely manner. It also shows organizers tryign to sort everyone and move the patients around in ways that benefit all parties. Essentially, this documentary is highlighting the issues that exist in the ER because of lack of staff, beds, and overall means to take care of the large influx of patients. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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  1. "“In the globalized world of the 21st century,” it argued, simply stopping disease at national borders is not adequate. Nor is it sufficient to respond to diseases after they have become established in a population. Rather, it is necessary to prepare for unknown outbreaks in advance"
  2. “World health is indivisible, [and] we cannot satisfy our most parochial needs without attending to the health conditions of all the globe.”
  3. "This tension relates to a difference in aims but also in forms of intervention: emergency response is acute, short-term, focused on alleviating what is conceived as a temporally circumscribed event; whereas “social” interventions—such as those associated with development policy—focus on transforming political-economic structures over the long term. Thus, in global health initiatives we find a contrast between possible modalities of intervention that parallels the one already described in U.S.–based biosecurity efforts: between acute emergency measures on the one hand and long-term approaches to health and welfare on the other."
  4. "Although there is a great sense of urgency to address contemporary biosecurity problems— and while impressive resources have been mobilized to do so — there is no consensus about how to conceptualize these threats, nor about what the most appropriate measures are to deal with them."

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tamar.rogoszinski
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The authors discuss that there is little information regarding this topic because there is a lack of research. This is pointed out by the fact that they could only find 38 articles that related to this topic. They also point out that there is an urgency for an analysis regarding the impact of this violence on the facilities, organizations, and on the populations that benefitted from the humanitarian presence. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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The author of this article is Scott G. Knowles, the Department Head for the History Deparment Center for Science, Technology and Society. He has a PhD from Johns Hopkins. He focuses on risk and disaster, with particular interests in modern cities, technology, and public policy. He's released several books on the topic. He has a hefty resume with various publications and activity on research boards, showing his vast knowledge on these topics.