Deutsche Welle: Ukraine: Cultural heritage sites damaged after dam burst. “Churches, monuments and museums are submerged all over the Kherson region. Archaeological sites dating back to the Scythians — a nomadic people who lived in the region in the 8th century BC — and a Greek settlement from around 400 BC have been damaged or irretrievably destroyed.”
Yale: New AI platform aims to improve disaster response. “Picture this: a magnitude 7.2 earthquake strikes San Francisco in the dead of night. As local and federal officials scramble to assess the damage and plan a response, they have a sophisticated new dashboard in front of them with real-time, on-the-ground data—informed by commercial satellite imagery and Tweets, with analysis by artificial intelligence.”
University of New South Wales: Augmented reality project explores lived experience of disaster survivors. “An augmented reality project exploring the relationship between wellbeing and place will provide insight into why some people in adverse circumstances don’t always access mental health services. Hard place/Good place, led by UNSW Scientia Professor Jill Bennett as part of her Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, will develop an archive of experiential stories with people from regional, rural and remote areas, exploring what it means to be in a ‘hard place’ or a ‘good place’.”
FEMA: FEMA Launches National Risk Index Update. “FEMA announced the full application launch of the National Risk Index, a new online resource that provides a clear, visual guide to natural hazard risks throughout the United States, and information to help communities to understand and reduce those risks, whether they involve flooding, wildfire, extreme heat, or drought.”
WUSF: State Launches Website To Provide Surfside Assistance, Warns Of GoFundMe Scams . “Florida has created a new website that pools together federal, state and community efforts to help victims, families and first responders affected by the Surfside collapse, amid warnings of GoFundMe scams.”
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: NIH Disaster Research Response program launches new website. “For more than 20 years, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has played a lead role in our nation’s health research following oil spills, hurricanes, and other environmental calamities. Now, the institute is providing a new home for the Disaster Research Response (DR2) program and its vast collection of web-based resources needed for scientists to conduct vital and timely public health research in the aftermath of disasters. More than 500 curated research tools and resources are now organized into an easy-to-use online portal, available on the NIEHS website free of charge.”
National Academies: New Rapid Expert Consultation Offers Strategies for Navigating Disaster Response, Evacuation, and Sheltering Complicated by COVID-19. “A new rapid expert consultation from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identifies strategies for emergency planners and decision-makers to consider as they update their disaster plans for evacuation, sheltering, and mass care amid COVID-19.”
Climate Centre: Turning up the volume on early humanitarian action: ‘one-stop-shop’ Anticipation Hub goes live. “The new Anticipation Hub was created by the German Red Cross, the IFRC and the Climate Centre with funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office and was launched today as part of the online 8th Global Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action. It is designed as a one-stop-shop for knowledge, learning and guidance on anticipatory action, and already has more than 60 partners across the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, governments, universities, research institutes, NGOs, UN agencies, and other networks.”
University of Southern California: USC Researchers Develop Tool to Aid Businesses Struggling with Disasters. “The Business Resilience Calculator (BRC) is a tool designed to help businesses minimize losses during uncertain times. The calculator was developed through a joint partnership by researchers at the University of Southern California, and The Ohio State University through the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI). It empowers users to make cost-effective resilience investments to reduce losses during business interruptions. A pre-release version of the tool is being offered for free to help provide relief to businesses affected by COVID-19.”
University of Vermont: In Disasters, Twitter Influencers Get Out-Tweeted. “When it comes to sharing emergency information during natural disasters, new University of Vermont research shows how timing is everything. The new study on Twitter use during hurricanes, floods and tornadoes offers potentially life-saving data about how information is disseminated in emergency situations, and by whom. The research is the first to look at social media patterns across different disaster types, focusing on five of the decade’s costliest U.S. emergencies.”
Patch: Molasses Flood Victims’ Death Certificates Now Online. “A century ago 21 people, including two school children and one 65-year-old house wife were killed in the Great Molasses Flood in the North End. Now, their death certificates are online as part of a new online archives system the Secretary of the Commonwealth announced Tuesday.”
Quartzy: The Cruelty And Kindness Of Social Media In The Midst Of A Disaster. “There was a time, long before social media was blamed for many of the world’s biggest problems, that digital communities were posited as the utopian replacement to the small-mindedness of staying close to home, close to what we know. Of course, that didn’t turn out so well. We know now that compassion, empathy, and community can’t be provided by a large tech company with a clear profit motive for winning our attention. In times of disaster as well as in times of normalcy, that part is up to us.”
Phys .org: Social media provides critical information missed by FEMA. “Social media sites can be a valuable tool for assessing the impact of natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey, but a new report indicates much of the critical information conveyed by those sites is overlooked by federal authorities. Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research reports that almost half of Hurricane Harvey damage reports provided by social media users were not captured by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates.”
University at Buffalo: During disasters, active Twitter users likely to spread falsehoods. “We know that Twitter is littered with misinformation. But how good are the social media platform’s most active users at detecting these falsehoods, especially during public emergencies? Not good, according to new University at Buffalo research that examined more than 20,000 tweets during Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon bombing.”
Halifax Today: Saint Mary’s University historian creating Halifax Explosion database. “A Saint Mary’s University postdoctoral fellow is creating the Halifax Explosion database (HExD), which aims to track details of every person who died in the disaster on December 6, 1917. Dr. Claire Halstead told NEWS 95.7’s The Rick Howe Show her research started with the Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book at the Nova Scotia Archives, which gave her raw data, including names, addresses and ages, and her research is adding to that information.”
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