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"Moreover, in any mumber of disasters over the past two centuries, the 'disaster investigation,' far from proving itself the dispassionate, scientific verdict on causality and blame, actually emerges as a hard-fought contest to define the moment in politics and society, in technology and culture."

"And, no investigation he could provide would change the fact that most Americans viewed the burning of the Capitol in 1814 as a diplomatic and military, not an engineering, disaster."

"Certainly the move to NIST places a great premium on the power of "investigation" as not only a technical, but also a moral tool, a sacred act, assigning a higher meaning to the tests and calculations that must ultimately assign causes and fix blame--but this is nothing new in American history. While the investigator's tools may have sharpened since Latrobe's study of the Capitol, the Hague Street inquest, or the Iroquois Fire, disaster investigation still pits expert against expert, the demand for patient study against the will to rebuild and forget."

This policy was, in part, designed to prevent "patient dumping" whereby hospitals would refuse to treat certain patients due to inability to pay for treatment and either refuse admittance or transfer them to other hospitals. Furthermore, it specifically addresses female patients in active labor, requiring that hospitals ensure that these patients are also treated and stabilized in the emergency department or receiving facility.

The authors rely heavily on anecdotal evidence provided through interviews of survivors of Hurricane Katrina, though they supplement this with statistics, socioeconomic data, and mental health data.

A professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University, Dr. Byron Good, Ph.D. is an anthropologist who has conducted research on mental illness and the society's perspective on various mental illnesses. He has authored and published numerous research articles, publications, and books on his areas of research. 

The authors cite instances of violence against healthcare providers and the environments in which these instances have occured. Anecdotal evidence along with research data on these issues are presented to support the authors' case.

This article from 2009 focuses on the controversy of a garbage incenerator in the Ironbound that has sparked civil engagements to make the facility practice clean emmisions. Despite their reports of emmision reductions in 2005, the community argued that the garbage incenereator looked over many occassions where they violated those regulations, and how it still effects those communities. Here we see how the governments and people's interest don't line up.

OSHA is a part of the United States Department of Labor and is overseen by the Secretary of Labor. The chief administrator of OSHA is the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, who is supported by a Chief of Staff and several Senior Advisors. The Assistant Secretary oversees two Deputy Assistant Secretaries who supervises various directors and administrators. The full organization chart can be found on the OSHA website.

• "Until the early 1990s, illness was used as grounds for seeking a residence permit in only exceptional cases. Ten years later, the health criterion had become one of the primary grounds for legalization, and one that was increasing most rapidly."
• “The compassion protocol is thus a procedure of the last resort that derives from a form of sympathy evoked in the face of suffering. It demands the right to keep alive individuals who have nothing except their mere existence."
• “Sometimes the foreigner, too, is no more than his body, but this body is no longer the same: useless to the political economy, it now finds its place in a new moral economy that values suffering over labor and compassion more than rights.”

Natural disasters are the first type of disaster that comes to mind when assessing FEMA's response efforts, but the organization is also concerned with response to acts of terrorism, acts of war by a foreign nation, and other manmade disasters. That being said, FEMA was heavily criticized for its response during and after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.