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- Permanent Link:
- http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/FI13042596/00001
Notes
- Summary:
- The document is a historiography of how human societies’ have conceptualized their relationship to disaster, and their collective organizing to deal with them, whether attempting to prevent disasters, mitigate their affects, or respond when they occurred. The work is intended to fill a gap in the academic literature on civil protection, emergency management, and disaster planning. The author relies on historical accounts, documents from disaster-oriented government bureaucracies, and country reports on civil protection programs and organizations. For areas of the world with less clear records, researchers with expertise in this subject were contacted. The document begins by outlining how people gradually shifted their beliefs about the origins of disasters from supernatural forces as a result of the rise of secularism and science’s increasing prominence as a means of attaining knowledge, to viewing them as the end products of human actions that could be modified to reduce risk. The author then shows how the evolution in perceptions led to changes in how civilizations responded to disasters. Then particular significance is given to how national action to warn and protect civilians from bomb raids during WWII and potential nuclear attacks during the Cold War became the foundation for developing systems to prepare for natural disasters. The author outlines how these national defense initiatives were redefined at the community level to address the local realities of natural disasters, shifting focus from the concept of civil defense to that of emergency planning. The document is concluded with a description of trends that characterize civil protection activities today. The author finds that disaster management is viewed the world over as an explicit responsibility of governments, but that most civil protection systems are poorly integrated, with the existence of such systems in developing societies being nominal at best. While disaster planning has been broken up into phases [mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery], greater emphasis has been placed on the latter aspects despite public proclamations calling for a focus on mitigation. A major development is the general movement away from treating different types of disasters as wholly distinct, towards an all hazards approach. This shift further reinforces the notion that disasters are social occurrences rather than the result of natural forces, and that vulnerabilities to various natural hazards have similar underlying social factors. ( , )
- Subject:
- General Risk Management
- Citation/Reference:
- Quarantelli, E. L. (2000). Disaster planning, emergency management and civil protection: the historical development of organized efforts to plan for and to respond to disasters. University of Delaware Disaster Research Center.
Record Information
- Source Institution:
- Florida International University
- Rights Management:
- Refer to main document/publisher for use rights.
- Resource Identifier:
- FI13042596
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