Report from the Field: Maxwell AFB, ISB, Alabama Tornado Disaster, DR – 1971 After the recent tornado disaster in Alabama, IEM supported federal disaster logistics operations as a member of the disaster response teams stationed at Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, AL, ISB (Incident Support Base). The process during this mission involved tracking over 500, 53 foot […]
This is a very good, easy-to-understand discussion of how much radiation we are typically exposed to and what the regulatory limits are, to help put into context the radiation levels being reported in Japan and even now in the US. http://people.reed.edu/~emcmanis/radiation.html Author: Justin Krometis, Transportation Analyst
Based on official information from March 22, 2011, showing an increasingly dire situation in Japan, we are revising the damage cost and fatality estimates published in an earlier post (The Estimated Costs of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake). We are revising our estimates upward substantially to 12,000 – 14,720 deaths and damage costs of approximately $225 […]
The March 11, 2011, earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a tsunami with catastrophic impacts. Due to the scale of this combined disaster, we estimate damage costs of $150 billion (12 trillion yen). This 9.0 magnitude earthquake makes it the 4th largest in world history, and the largest in Japan’s history. The impact was […]
Since the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended on March 16 that US residents who are within 50 miles of the damaged Japanese nuclear power plants should evacuate, there has been a lot of speculation as to why the NRC would recommend such a large evacuation zone when the guidance for the plume exposure pathway emergency […]
In March/April 1979, I was part of a field team working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Pennsylvania gathering information on the emergency response effort in the area around the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power station as a result of the accident that occurred there. The elevation of the Fukushima Daishi incident […]
Once again, the evening news has me scratching my head and wondering if it is time to call my healthcare provider to secure a prescription for Potassium Iodide or even Prussian Blue? As a nurse and healthsystem analyst, I want to protect my family. But wait! I have a shellfish allergy, and one television medical […]
I have participated in over a dozen evacuation studies over the last several years, many of them focused on nuclear plants, so I have been closely following the protective actions being taken around the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan. I wanted an easy way to look at the towns affected and the road network […]
The damage inflicted on infrastructure by an earthquake or tsunami is is fundamentally different than that caused by a hurricane. In particular, while transportation following a hurricane is primarily inhibited by debris resulting from wind damage, an earthquake or tsunami causes substantial damage to infrastructure, including highways, railroads, airports and ferry terminals. Transportation infrastructure damage […]
I’ve been asked the question a couple of times over the past few days by family and friends, some who know I work in homeland security and emergency management, some who know I spent more than 12 years as an engineer at a nuclear power plant. My answers have generally started with “It’s a little […]
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