Social Science Disasters

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror?

Resilience is a worthwhile pursuit, both for individuals and communities. But how do we build strength into our lives as citizens? And into our towns? According to author Scott James, the answer lies within our neighborhoods, where sustainability meets preparedness. Prepared Neighborhoods will walk you step by step through creating a more resilient - and enjoyable - neighborhood and community.

The coronavirus has been a disaster for America, but it’s been an unprecedented opportunity for the left. In They Never Let a Crisis Goes to Waste, Jason Chaffetz delves into progressive efforts to leverage crises to force their priorities into law. Whether the crisis is legitimate, fabricated, or exaggerated, the solution is always the same: more government, less individual freedom, higher spending, higher taxes.

Americans have been shocked in the past few years to discover how vulnerable our nation is to disaster, be it terrorist attack or act of God. But what's truly shocking, argues leading security expert Stephen Flynn, is how little we have learned from the cataclysms of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to catastrophe, America is living on borrowed time and squandering it. But it doesn't have to be this way.

On the morning of 26 April 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than 5 percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Tony Redmond is one of the few truly good people you will ever meet. His is a story of tireless hard work and astonishing bravery across wars, refugee crises, air crashes, earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes and disease outbreaks for more than 30 years. Featuring stories of hope and redemption, as well as untold suffering and mismanagement, this unique account could only have been written one who has for decades performed incredible feats of altruism.

As we all know, our everyday foods have their respective life spans. While some may last a little bit longer than others, there are also some that can't last for more than a week or even for a couple of days. More often than not, we are also not able to consume the food within its given shelf life. So we just wish we can prolong its freshness. If you are one of those people who have always been planning to do canning and preserving yet still haven't started because you do not know anything about it, then it is about time that you learn the basic how-to of canning and preserving.

On December 3, 1999, the call crackled in to the men of the Worchester, Massachusetts Fire Department: a three-alarm warehouse blaze in a six-story windowless colossus of brick and mortar. What happened next, and how their lives and community were changed forever, offers an unprecedented look at these heroic men whose job it is to rush into burning buildings when everyone else just wants out.

In Americans at Risk, Dr. Irwin Redlener draws on his broad experience as a pediatrician working with mobile emergency units both for children and adults, his time making recommendations to legislators about the vulnerabilities of children to biological and chemical agents and his regular meetings with Tom Ridge of the office of Homeland Security over a period of four years to write this urging a plan for a coordinated plan between government and the private sector.

We are in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Sixty-five million people are fleeing for their lives. The choices are urgent, not just for them but for all of us. What can we possibly do to help? With compassion and clarity, David Miliband shows why we should care and how we can make a difference. He takes us from war zones in the Middle East to peaceful suburbs in America to explain the crisis and show what can be done, not just by governments with the power to change policy but by citizens with the urge to change lives.

American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uphill, transforming over 1000 miles of roiling currents into a placid staircase of water, and wresting the lower half of the river apart from its floodplain. American law has aided and abetted these feats. But despite our best efforts, so-called "natural disasters" continue to strike the Mississippi basin as raging floodwaters decimate waterfront communities and abandoned towns literally crumble into the Gulf of Mexico.

On Shishmaref Island in Alaska, homes are being washed into the sea. In the South Pacific, small island nations face annihilation by encroaching waters. In coastal Louisiana, an area the size of a football field disappears every day. For these communities, sea level rise isn’t a distant, abstract fear: it’s happening now and it’s threatening their way of life. In The Rising Sea, Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young warn that many other coastal areas may be close behind.

Natural disasters bedevil our planet, and each appears to be a unique event. Leading geologist Susan W. Kieffer shows how all disasters are connected. In 2011 there were fourteen natural calamities that each destroyed over a billion dollars' worth of property in the United States alone. In 2012 Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and major earthquakes struck in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Dr Matt Winning is a stand-up comedian and environmental economist with a PhD in climate change policy, which means he's the sort of doctor who will rush to your side if you fall ill on a plane, but only to berate you for flying. We are currently facing a global climate emergency. You've probably noticed. But why does the end of the world need to be so depressing? Hot Mess aims to both lighten the mood and enlighten listeners on climate change. This is an audiobook for people who care about climate change but aren't doing much about it.

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.

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.

For most San Franciscans, April 18, 1906 started at 5:12 a.m. with 65 seconds of violent quaking followed by a relentless, raging fire that left 98% of the structures in the most populated part of the city in ruins. However, while everyone felt the earthquake equally, they did not all suffer to the same degree. In Saving San Francisco, Andrea Rees Davies, a former firefighter, tells a new story of the 1906 catastrophe. Saving San Francisco challenges the long-lived myth that the fire brought out altruism and leveled class distinctions among residents.

Across the country minority communities feel under attack by police officers. The Politics of Crisis explores how to change public policy decisions to reform the role of law enforcement. Centered around the harrowing events of the Freddie Gray riots that gripped Baltimore in 2015, The Politics of Crisis is a powerful examination of how everything can go wrong when police no longer serve their communities.

This original audiobook considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history. Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.