Showing titles in Disaster Relief

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies.

In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the North Atlantic. Rocked by 50-foot swells and 40-knot gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. This is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship.

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat, but was soon in as much trouble as the tanker. Then pilot boat captain Frank Quirk, hearing of the Coast Guard's troubles on his radio, decided to act.

When it all hits the fan, some know how to survive and some don’t. Knowledge and experience are at the root of survival in troubled times. We do not always know when those times come, so it can be useful to explore the possibilities of living off the grid, becoming independent, and living without water from the faucet, electricity, or internet.

In 2014, after fighting through yards of bureaucratic red tape, leaving her family, and putting her own health at risk in order to help suffering strangers, Kwan Kew Lai finally arrived in Africa to volunteer as an infectious disease specialist in the heart of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. What she found was not only blistering heat, inhospitable working conditions, and deadly, unrelenting illness, but hope, resilience, and incredible courage.

If a disaster occurred would you be prepared? Could you feed and defend your family? Do you hope for the best but want to be ready for the worst? We live in uncertain times. The threat of disaster - both man-made and natural - looms ever present. Could you depend on yourself if you had to? Could you take care of your family? This book on SHTF prepping will teach why it's important to be ready, what you need to do to get prepared, what types of items and supplies you'll need after a disaster, and offers plans for both short-term and long-term survival.

The prepper's guide with a difference. During the 1940s, Britain suffered a national catastrophe that would become known as "The Great Tribulation" by its survivors. The remnant of His Majesty's Government formed a department known as The Ministry of Survivors, the mandate of this office being to help, guide, and inform the public through the anarchy around them. During the early years, they produced and issued a handbook known as The Citizen Survivor's Handbook.

The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped America’s natural-disaster policies for the next century. The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It was the nation’s most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.

On the morning of May 9, 1980, harbor pilot John Lerro was guiding a 600-foot freighter, the Summit Venture, into Tampa Bay. Directly in the ship's path was the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Suddenly, a violent weather cell reduced visibility to zero at the precise moment when Lerro attempted to direct the 20,000-ton vessel underneath the bridge. Unable to stop or see where he was going, Lerro drove the ship into a support pier.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

If you want to continue your lifestyle AND make smart money moves, then The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide is the book for you. Saving money and profiting means understanding the many aspects of life where problems can strike, and this book will be your guide. In the face of disaster it is better to plan than panic. A bulletproof plan will protect you from the disastrous surprise of a mishap-from shakeups in the stock market to the next oil crisis to fires and floods.

Is this finally it? The end times? Because from COVID-19 to climate catastrophe to the looming AI revolution—not to mention the ever-growing background hum of rage, fear, and anxiety—it’s starting to feel like the party we call civilization is just about over. The good news? It’s always felt that way.

A lethal mix of natural disaster, dangerously flawed construction, and reckless human actions devastated San Francisco in 1906 and New Orleans in 2005...the poor, the elderly, and the medically infirm were disproportionately among the thousands who perished. In Recovering Inequality, Steve Kroll-Smith builds a convincing case that disaster recovery and the reestablishment of social and economic inequality are inseparable.

Getting married in a refugee camp is a tricky business. It's a world without rules, where the value of money changes by the day, rumors and gossip are everywhere, and tragedy is a constant backdrop. A Syrian Wedding tells the true story of Mohammad and Amneh, a young couple who are navigating this treacherous landscape as they try to prepare for what should be the happiest day of their lives.

When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to "natural disasters" or "acts of God." But what if they're neither? What if we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves? That's the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first audiobook to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a "perfect storm," but a tragedy of our own making - and one that could become commonplace.

This audiobook attempts to answer as many of those questions as possible through an informal, narrative style. It focuses on the overall experience and the feelings and emotions of the people going through it rather than just on facts and figures. It covers every aspect of the Titanic saga from inception and construction to the recent rediscovery of the ship. It also examines the impact of the disaster on society and culture.

Ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest, the Currowan fire was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia's Black Summer. It burnt for 74 days, consuming nearly 5,000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. In the aftermath, there were questions. Why were resources so few that many faced the flames alone? Why was there back-burning on a day of extreme fire danger? Why weren’t they better prepared?

The world as we know it is changing, again. Pandemics are an inescapable reality. The interconnectedness of the world means that a new virus today can become a global outbreak tomorrow. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. And when it does, life as we know it alters considerably. Social distancing is here to stay; it will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.

The United States is more vulnerable than ever to an EMP attack that could shut down the country overnight, resulting in tens of millions of deaths and a 19th-century lifestyle for Americans for the foreseeable future, says a new book, A Nation Forsaken, written by a long-time national security expert. Even worse, the threat doesn't just come from terrorists, but from unpreventable solar activity - and a new peak period is on the way,