Social Science Disasters

When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a 20-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply - 100 - was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe.

When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped 33 miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking 69 days. After the disaster, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales, and in Deep Down Dark he brings them to haunting, visceral life.

It’s goodbye, Brewster Elementary and hello, Broomsfield Academy when Heidi starts middle school at the only school in the country that has secret classes for witches in training! Heidi is excited but nervous about living on her own and making new friends (and new crushes)! Her first day takes a turn for the worse when Heidi discovers her roommate is none other than her old rival, Melanie Maplethorpe! Melanie is also less than thrilled, and the two find themselves engaged in an epic prank war. But when magic enters the mix, will the reluctant roommates go too far?

In Tinder Box, Tony Hatch, former CBS reporter and Emmy Award winner, tells the Iroquois story as it has never been told before. In a rush to open the theater on time, corners were cut, and the Iroquois lacked the most basic fire-fighting equipment: sprinklers, fire alarm boxes, backstage telephone, exit signs, and functioning asbestos curtain. Some exits, for aesthetic reasons, were hidden behind heavy draperies, doors opened inward, and exterior fire escapes were unfinished.

Words Whispered in Water is the story of how - against all odds - one woman exposed the culprit in the catastrophic flooding and compelled the news media, and the government, to tell the truth. Words Whispered in Water highlights the importance of exposing the bad behavior of giant corporations and bureaucracies whose unsavory activities affect millions of people, because once bad behavior is exposed, there is noticeably less fraud and better behavior on the part of an organization.

The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.

In Your Government Failed You, Clarke looks at why failures have continued and how America and the world can succeed against the terrorists. But Clarke goes beyond terrorism to examine the recurring U.S. government disasters. Despite the lessons of Vietnam, we've gotten involved in Iraq. Drawing on his 30 years in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and Intelligence Community, Clarke discovers patterns in the failure and suggests ways to stop the cycle.

Lengthy investigations revealed cover ups, covert operations, reckless corporate management, numerous safety violations, and a broken regulatory process. At the time of the spill, oil flowed through the Alyeska pipeline at a profit of $400,000 per hour, yet in the end, the 10,000 fishermen affected by the spill spent nearly 20 years in litigation and received little compensation for their losses. Despite a massive cleanup effort, oil remains on the beaches and continues to impact marine life.

Agent Orange, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the Virginia Tech massacre, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Deep Horizon gulf oil spill: Each was a disaster in its own right. What they had in common was their aftermath - each required compensation for lives lost, bodies maimed, livelihoods wrecked, economies and ecosystems upended. In each instance, an objective third party had to step up and dole out allocated funds: In each instance, Presidents, Attorneys General, and other public officials have asked Kenneth R. Feinberg to get the job done.

February 5, 1898. Witnesses report a giant orange fireball reflected in the glacial waters of Alaska's Lynn Canal. At the height of Klondike gold fever, the Clara Nevada disappeared into an epic storm - taking passengers and priceless cargo with it. Was the explosion an accident or a robbery gone wrong? Did Captain C.H. Lewis make off with $165,000 ($13.6 million in today's currency) in raw gold? Or was the sinking a case of a sea-weary steamer meeting an untimely end?

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that governments matter again, that competent leadership is the difference between living and dying. A few governments proved adept at handling the crisis while many others failed. Are Western governments healthy and strong enough to keep their citizens safe from another virulent virus—and protect their economies from collapse? Is global leadership passing from the United States to Asia—and particularly China? As The Wake-Up Call makes clear, governments around the world must re-engineer the way they operate to meet the challenges ahead.

When the terrorist attacks struck New York City on September 11, 2001, boat operators and waterfront workers quickly realized that they had the skills, the equipment, and the opportunity to take definite, immediate action in responding to the most significant destructive event in the United States in decades. For many of them, they were “doing what needed to be done”. American Dunkirk shows how people, many of whom were volunteers, mobilized rescue efforts in various improvised and spontaneous ways on that fateful date.

The true story of a resilient circle of shrimp boat captains who faced and withstood the wreckage of Katrina but now find their courage tested by a greater threat: the disappearance of their livelihood and their centuries-old bayou culture.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, shares what he has learnt in more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address climate problems. He explains how the world can work to build the tools it needs to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions - investing in research, inventing new technologies and deploying them quickly at a large scale. Gates is optimistic that the world can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

At the edge of Houston sits a community like no other: 65 petite, pastel houses inhabited by survivors of Hurricane Katrina and built by one of the most famous people in the world, Oprah Winfrey. The community, funded with $10 million of Oprah's money just a few months after Katrina, is made up of 65 families picked by nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. All pay around $400 a month in mortgage to live there. The houses are nearly identical. Angel Lane is not only a place, but an idea.

The deadly hurricane of 1928 claimed 2500 lives, and the long-forgotten story of the casualties, as told in Black Cloud, continues to stir passion. Among the dead were 700 black Floridian men, women, and children who were buried in an unmarked West Palm Beach ditch during a racist recovery and rebuilding effort that conscripted the labor of blacks much like latter-day slaves.

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservationists of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak.

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive.

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.