Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press A child is pulled from beneath a collapsed wall at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in in Moore.What is it in human nature that leads to children dying in collapsed schools in the face of predicted, even inevitable, disasters?
I first began reporting on this issue after the dreadful school collapses in the potent 2008 earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, then quickly learned about similar vulnerability in Oregon — where hundreds of schools have been deemed deeply vulnerable to the next inevitable great earthquake on the Cascadia fault.
Now, the Associated Press is reporting the following:
An emergency official says Oklahoma has reinforced tornado shelters in hundreds of schools across the state, but the two that were hit by this week’s storms in suburban Oklahoma City did not have them.
Albert Ashwood is director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. He told reporters Tuesday it’s up to each jurisdiction to set priorities for which schools get limited funding for safe rooms.
Ashwood says a shelter would not necessarily have saved more lives at the Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children sheltering in above-ground classrooms were killed. He says no disaster mitigation measure is absolute.
He says authorities are going to review which schools have safe rooms and try to get them in more schools across the state.
Thoughts welcome.
Brett Deering/Getty Images The horror confronting residents and emergency workers probing the tornado wreckage in Oklahoma is unimaginable for those of use elsewhere. Collapsed schools, disintegrated homes, crushed cars and more. The main focus should be on aid.
But it’s worth beginning a conversation about ways to live safer in such hazard zones given that this storm season is just getting under way and that big regions of America’s tornado hot zone have deep vulnerability resulting from runaway growth and a human tendency to discount threats that have a low probability but disastrous potential. (The same issues are driving exposure to danger in hurricane zones.)
Paul Hellstern/The Oklahoman, via Associated Press Teachers carry children away from Briarwood Elementary school after a tornado destroyed the school in south Oklahoma City, Monday, May 20, 2013. At the bottom of this post I’m appending a moving and important contribution from Kevin Simmons, an economist who blogs on the economics of natural hazards and is co-author, with Daniel Sutter, of “Economic and Societal Impacts of Tornadoes.” Simmons said there’ll be many lessons learned in examining where deaths occurred and were avoided in the path of this astounding twister. He noted the example of two destroyed schools:
Briarwood Elementary and Plaza Tower Elementary are about a mile apart and both were in the path of the storm. As of this writing there are no fatalities at Briarwood and many from Plaza Tower.
He stressed it’s too soon to know whether it was simple luck or other factors that made the difference. [3:39 p.m. | Insert | The Associated Press has cited officials saying that the two schools did not have tornado safe rooms. The same issue is seen in Oregon, where hundreds of schools are known to be at risk from the next big earthquake.] Read on below. Read more…
Paul Polak A proposed system using mirrors to increase the power of a solar panel and pump water to crops.One of the finest applications of solar photovoltaic panels is in powering drip irrigation systems for farmers in hot, sunny, poor parts of the world. You don’t even need to store the electricity. The pumping is mainly needed when the sun is shining.
To gauge the remarkable benefits of such systems, start with this peer-reviewed study of solar irrigation projects in Africa’s dry zone led by Jennifer Burney of the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford: “Solar-powered drip irrigation enhances food security in the Sudano–Sahel.”
One of the challenges, as with many solar systems, is cost.
Now, Paul Polak, a veteran developer of simply designed products that can benefit the world’s poor (particularly farmers), is trying to raise $50,000 using Indiegogo to produce what he and some volunteer engineers say will be a 2,000-watt solar pumping system that is affordable for farmers who make $3 to $5 a day. (There are three weeks and around $35,000 to go.)
The initial focus is to establish something of a water hub in a village in India. As Polak explains, “When two or more of these pumps are in the same vicinity it creates a micro-market for excess water, creating opportunity for the poorer farmers.”
There’s much more background on the proposal here and in this video:
I sent some background on the technology to Professor Burney and sent her questions to Polak. Read on for the discussion (I’ve cleaned up some e-mail shorthand):
Read more…
On This American Life this weekend, Ira Glass tried to jog the climate conversation out of the “mire and muck” with an hourlong discussion of impacts and options related to human-driven global warming. Below you can offer examples of people or institutions you see avoiding the pitfalls and paralysis surrounding this “super wicked” issue.
The three-part show is now broken into podcasts: Read more…
Andrew C. Revkin Dawn and dusk at Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, N.Y.Earlier this week, I spoke at the 20th meeting of the Adirondack Research Consortium.* This coalition of scientists and institutions has focused on providing data and analysis that can help sustain the ecological and economic integrity of New York’s 6-million-acre, 120-year-old Adirondack Park.
In my talk, I described the park as a positive example of what the biologist Erle C. Ellis calls “anthromes” — “ecological patterns created by sustained direct human interactions with ecosystems.”
Environmental management in such places can succeed when there’s sustained scientific monitoring and engagement of diverse constituencies, I said, creating “zones of compromise, adaptability, and complexity.”
Consider that the Adirondack region has seen people as variegated as snowmobilers and wildlife defenders — not always easily — continue working to find common ground. Welcome to the ecology of the Anthropocene — this era of Earth history that is increasingly of our own making.
During a break, Tomeka Weatherspoon of Mountain Lake PBS recorded an interview in which I provided an update on why I blog and discussed the importance of the Adirondacks as a test case in how human-developed landscapes can sustain rich biological webs. As I explained: Read more…
Much has been made this week of the gap between what the public thinks about the consensus among climate scientists over the human factor in global warming and the actual level of consensus. The discussion has centered on a new study reviewing how anthropogenic global warming was characterized in more than 12,000 climate science papers between 1991 and 2011. More than 97 percent of the papers stating a cause for warming, the authors found, pointed to humans. In contrast, surveys consistently show that Americans are pretty evenly divided when asked whether they think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. (Read my e-mail exchange with two authors for more background.)
The clear message of the team conducting this fresh assessment of the climate science consensus is that it’s vital to close that gap to have a chance of breaking societal deadlock on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. On his Skeptical Science blog, John Cook, the paper’s lead author, put it this way:
Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97% consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.
Forgotten in much of this is a point made in an e-mail message sent to me and some other science communicators this morning by Dan Kahan, the Yale law professor who studies the cultural filters that influence how people perceive and react to information. Kahan linked to his fresh post reviewing how many times in recent years such studies have been promoted, then asked this: Read more…
The white areas are brain tissue damaged by the author’s stroke.Twenty two months ago, I interrupted my nonstop journalistic pursuit of paths toward sustainable human progress to focus on sustaining myself. The hiatus was not by choice, but was mandated by a stroke — the out-of-the-blue variant, the rare kind of “brain attack” (the term preferred by some neurologists) that is most often seen in otherwise healthy, youngish middle-aged people.
I blogged on my cerebral misadventure as it unfolded, as some may recall, but only got around to writing up an article about it after Ben Lillie, who left high-energy physics to focus on science storytelling and co-created Story Collider, invited me to tell my stroke tale as part of a special story slam in Brooklyn focused on brain science. (The event was part of Brain Awareness Week.) Here’s the Soundcloud player with my tale, as related to a roomful of Brooklynites in March (I think you’ll enjoy it; no kidding):
Here are some prime take-home points:
Take your body seriously.
Time (wasted) is brain (lost).
Question authority, but not too much.
Old habits die hard.
This Twitter item, which I posted from the hospital, says a lot, as well:
Read more…
Justin Gillis’s latest “By Degrees” report is focused on the recent flurry of findings and discussion related to one of the most important and enduring questions in climate science: How much warming will result from a given buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases?
Specifically, how much will temperatures rise if the concentration of the main greenhouse gas of concern, carbon dioxide, doubles from the level of 280 parts per million that prevailed as the industrial revolution got into gear in the 19th century and was not exceeded for hundreds of thousands of years prior to that.
Please give the article a read, review related Dot Earth posts and weigh in — constructively.
Here’s an excerpt and link: Read more…
Here’s a proposed strategy for sustaining human progress on a finite planet, in nine Twitter posts. What would you add or take away?
Read more…
Here are two useful articles assessing the latest thinking on the pace at which Greenland ice loss could raise sea levels and the implications of the recent plateau in global temperatures (one acknowledged by climate scientists including Susan Solomon and James Hansen):
Michael Lemonick at Climate Central writes on new research finding it’s unlikely that the recent surge of ice flowing into the sea from Greenland’s glaciers is the new normal (the work syncs with earlier analysis by Tad Pfeffer of the University of Colorado):
The flow of Greenland’s glaciers toward the sea may have increased significantly in the past decade, but a new report in Nature finds that rate of increase is unlikely to continue. “The loss of ice has doubled in the past 10 years, but it’s not going to double again,” said lead author Faezeh Nick, a glaciologist at the University Centre in Svalbard, in Longyearbyen, Norway, in an interview.
That conclusion, based on a new, sophisticated computer model, makes the worst-case scenario of sea level rise — an increase of 6 feet or so, on average, by 2100 — look less likely to play out.
Since the heat-trapping gas that has already put into the atmosphere will be there for hundreds of years to come, Greenland will continue to melt indefinitely. The fact that it may not happen quite as fast as the worst-case scenarios might forecast isn’t all that reassuring.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, in the model at least, the slowdown doesn’t necessarily bring glaciers back to their original, stately rate of flow. [Read the rest.]
David Appell has filed a thorough survey of research and scientists’ views on recent temperature fluctuations and climate sensitivity at Yale Climate Media Forum — “W[h]ither Global Warming: Has it Slowed Down?” Here’s an excerpt and link: Read more…