̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - disaster

Ounce of prevention, pound of cure

lw355 — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:34:13 +0000

Benjamin Franklin famously advised fire-threatened Philadelphians in 1736 that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Clearly, preventing fires is better than fighting them, but to what extent can we protect ourselves from natural disasters? Hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions are not in themselves preventable, but some of their devastating effects could be reduced through forward planning.

“It’s important to be able to recover resiliently from disasters and, as part of this, it’s vital to identify the vulnerabilities of communities living in hazard-prone regions,” explained Michael Ramage from the Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE). By putting resources into resilience and building back better, communities can reduce the risk of disastrous consequences should a similar event reoccur.”

Now, thanks to an information system that Cambridge researchers developed originally for tracking how regions recover from disasters, communities could soon have the means to understand how best to protect themselves from future catastrophes.

̽��ֱ��story begins in Haiti, where CURBE researcher Daniel Brown has been working over the past year with the British Red Cross and the United Nations following the devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed 316,000, displaced 1.3 million and destroyed almost 100,000 houses. In a country that was deeply impoverished before the earthquake, people continue to live under tarpaulins exposed to safety and security risks, with limited access to water, livelihoods and key services.

Brown travelled to the country to field-test a system that he and colleagues at Cambridge Architectural Research (CAR) and ImageCat had developed during the previous four years as a mapping technique for tracking post-disaster recovery.

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Brown had identified a suite of 12 ‘performance indicators’ spanning core recovery sectors extracted from high-resolution satellite imagery. He used these to map the recovery process in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, by looking at aspects such as the movement of populations, the construction of dwellings, the accessibility of roads, and the loss and rebuilding of livelihoods.

In Thailand and Pakistan, the system had already proved to be extremely useful. Brown’s work provided data and results that assisted decision making and had the potential to ensure the recovery process was both transparent and accountable.

In Haiti, the EPSRC-funded follow-on project aimed to fine-tune the performance indicators within operational situations to suit the workflow of aid agencies.

What Brown found, however, was that in the complex and dynamic situation that follows a disaster, agencies desperately needed a real-time system to help them decide where to put resources. “Many of the hundreds of maps produced within the first week of the Haiti earthquake were soon out of date because of the changeability of the situation,” he explained. “There was also a massive duplication of effort, with agencies often lacking trained staff to ensure the right information about buildings and people was acquired at the right time.”

Dr Stephen Platt, Chairman of CAR, who has also been working on the project, described how these findings confirmed the results of a survey the team had previously carried out: “Agencies told us that they lack coordinated mapping information on where displaced populations have gone and where they have begun to return to, as well as damage to livelihoods, and rehabilitation of homes and infrastructure. It’s very hard for them to decide where to put funds to the best effect for positive and resilient change.”

Brown’s first task was a remote analysis of the affected area from his office in Cambridge, using pre-disaster satellite imagery together with a new technique based on high-resolution oblique aerial photographs that capture views of the façade of buildings, and Lidar, which measures building height. On his arrival in Haiti, he identified which of the performance indicators was relevant for planning and used these to gather field information on the state of buildings, the socioeconomic impact on people, the safest places to rebuild and the community’s views. All data were integrated into a single database to aid the design of a rebuilding programme.

“We were delighted to find that the information system can be used for all phases of the disaster cycle, from preparedness through to damage assessment, then planning and finally recovery monitoring. You could think of each phase comprising a single module in the database. All these phases are effectively interrelated with each other – data produced during one phase can be used in another phase. So when we collected damage data, these could be used as a baseline to inform planning, and so on,” explained Brown.

Ramage, Principal Investigator for the follow-on project, added: “You can see how a system that can be used to predict where future vulnerabilities might be in a community is so important. And, through Steve’s work in New Zealand, Chile and Italy, we have learnt more about how governments and agencies in developed countries are currently responding to disasters, which has allowed us to learn more about how our system and ideas might be adapted for different contexts.”

Echoing this, Dr Emily So, Director of CURBE, explained how the project fitted into what’s been called the disaster management cycle: “Governments and agencies think in terms of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

What we are trying to do in our research – which builds on 25 years of work in this area in the Department of Architecture under the leadership of Professor Robin Spence – is to make sure that we not only do reactive groundwork after the disaster but also proactive work, to mitigate and prepare ahead of the event and reduce the risk of disaster.”

̽��ֱ��team has recently been awarded funding for a two-year project involving eight global institutions with the remit of using satellite remote sensing to understand risk and vulnerabilities in communities around the world, under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

“ ̽��ֱ��hazard itself is not what creates the disaster,” added So. “It’s the quality of the housing and the social fabric. This is where CURBE can help in terms of assessing exposure and proposing methods of evaluating it. Better information means better ideas, means better protection.”

For more information, please contact Louise Walsh (louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Working with humanitarian organisations in Haiti, Cambridge researchers have found that an information system they designed to track how regions recovered from disasters can also be used to support preparedness, planning and project management.

Better information means better ideas, means better protection.

Dr Emily So

Colin Crowley on flickr

Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake

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Shipwrecked: women and children first?

amb206 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:30:46 +0000

Barely three months short of the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, which went down on 15 April 1912, another shipwreck has galvanised the world’s attention. With tragic stories of loss, chaos and fear, shipwrecks have always fascinated onlookers, and been used to convey moral lessons. ̽��ֱ��Costa Concordia has reignited the potent debates over how one should behave in an emergency shipwreck situation. It is clear from the media response that the old question of whether ‘women and children’ should go first remains just as significant in 2012 as it seemed in 1912.

̽��ֱ��world’s press has dwelt on the lack of precedence of women and children aboard the 21st century sinking ship, with particular emphasis on the failures of professionalism and chivalry shown by the Italian captain, and his crew. Tales are circulating of burly crew members pushing pregnant women and children out of the way, and the failure of captain and crew to ensure that all were rescued before departing from the ship themselves. This, it is widely assumed, runs counter to all the traditions of international – and certainly British - codes of masculine honour which, in more dignified times past, put the vulnerable ahead of the chivalrous male.

̽��ֱ��Titanic is often conjured up in support of this historical assumption, as a shipwreck in which men bravely put women and children into the lifeboats, and met a freezing death as a result. There was indeed self-sacrifice aboard the Titanic, but ‘women and children first’ was much more contested in the past than today’s news coverage would have us believe. In 1912, plenty of people – and especially women and working class men - were forceful in their critiques of ‘women and children first’, and recognised that what seemed at first sight to be a humane impulse to help those whose youth, heavy dress or physical frailty made them vulnerable in a shipwreck actually acted as a heavy-handed method of diminishing certain men, and enforcing a particular role for women.

̽��ֱ��wreck of the British troop ship, the Birkenhead, in 1852 has often been seen as the paradigmatic example of ‘women and children first’. However, a survey of 19th century shipwreck narratives uncovers a relative lack of concern with the survival of the more vulnerable. A survivor from the emigrant ship the Northfleet, sunk in 1873, described meeting clusters of women as the ship went down, but ‘did not stop to speak to them for I was looking towards the boats, thinking that I might get hold of one of them yet’. When asked by a mother to save her baby, he records: ‘I could not do anything. For I felt the last had come.’ In the end, only one woman and two children were saved, while 83 men were rescued. A survivor of the Pegasus wreck in 1843 wrote: ‘… the stewardess attempted to get hold of me, but I extricated myself from her in order to save my own life.’ It turned out that not all women were equally deserving of protection at sea. Lower class women – wives of sailors or soldiers, or poor emigrant women – were frequently excluded from the rule, and women of colour were equally marginalised.

In many famous shipwrecks, women had to be removed by force. Their own choices were often to remain with their male relatives, or in the perceived safety of the ship. In some cases they were simply locked up in their cabins, as their hysteria was perceived to be dangerous. According to a survivor from the Evening Star, sunk in 1866, ‘… women rushed on deck, and sobbed and wept, ceaselessly demanding if there was no hope of safety. ̽��ֱ��captain was compelled, as a measure of precaution, to send them below again, and fasten the doors of their cabins’. Victorian women, then, were to be contained; the rule giving them precedence was partly for the relief and safety of the men on board ship. As it was practiced, ‘women and children first’ often resulted in women being treated as objects rather than being given special protection.

̽��ֱ��Victorians believed that only certain men were capable of putting women first. Men of colour or working class men were often described as failing to observe ‘women and children first’. In the sinking of the Northfleet, a survivor noted ‘there was a terrible panic … among the strong, rough men, when it became apparent that the vessel was sinking. ̽��ֱ��wild rush for the boats, and the mad confusion which took place, were like the trampling of a herd of buffaloes.’ This language of animality was common within shipwreck narratives – the panicked men were frequently compared to wild animals (‘rabid tigers’, ‘hornets’, ‘wild-cats’) and pictured as stampeding, trampling, or baying. Within these narratives, the ship’s captain or commanding officers typically played the role of proposing or enforcing ‘women and children first’, by appealing to the moral sensibility of the men or, more commonly, by violence.

̽��ֱ��focus of shipwreck narratives was on men controlling other men, rather than on the role or fate of women at sea. As more ‘ordinary’ working men such as stokers came to replace the skilled sailors of older maritime traditions in the late 19th century, there was growing concern over the lack of purchase chivalry would have at sea. When the Titanic sank in 1912, there was no certainty that men would put women first. If ‘women and children first’ was insisted on and celebrated at that moment, this was because no one was sure that it would persist.

̽��ֱ��survivor reports of the Titanic sinking, which saw the loss of more than 1,500 lives, were variable: some stressed calm and women’s precedence, others talked of masculine selfishness and loss of control, particularly among immigrant or working class men. It was only after a few days that a consensus emerged; in the Titanic disaster, the papers began to argue, all men had put women first, whatever their class and ethnicity. This was a new departure in shipwreck narratives, and was an emphasis that was intended to counter the troubling feminist activism of this period.

̽��ֱ��Edwardians were confronting a new idea – that women might not want to be put first in shipwrecks; they might prefer equality, not only in rescues, but also in politics and labour markets. In the early 20th century, feminist and suffragist women were well aware that the myth of male chivalry during shipwrecks was used to exclude them from positions of power in politics and society. They responded to the Titanic disaster with the memorable slogan, ‘Votes for Women, Boats for Men’, stressing that women voters would put human lives above corporate profit in regulating the ocean liner companies. They emphasised the irony of putting women first in shipwrecks, only to exploit or exclude them systematically in other realms. And some suggested that the vulnerable – the weak, the elderly, the very young - should precede the strong, whatever their sex.

̽��ֱ��Edwardian media were forced to acknowledge that women might make their own choices. ̽��ֱ��choice of Mrs Isidor Strauss to remain with her husband on the Titanic was widely reported and respected – Edwardian women at sea were not just objects, but had some potential for making choices themselves. ̽��ֱ��more radical Edwardians noticed that there was a class bias against working class passengers surviving the wreck – the widespread celebration that women and children had gone first aboard the Titanic evaporated in the realisation that ‘women first’ might actually mean ‘ladies first’.

̽��ֱ��celebrations of the so-called ‘law of the sea’, ‘women and children first’ did not last very long after 1912. In the years after the Titanic’s sinking, the initial emphasis on universal male chivalry was replaced by a tendency to stress Italian or Southern European failures of chivalry among the Titanic passengers. ̽��ֱ��Daily Mail had reported just after the wreck in 1912 that: ‘There are only a few exceptions to the unvarying tales of heroism, and the exceptions are due to the excitement at the last moments in the steerage … three Italians who disobeyed the rule of the sea, ‘women and children first’, were shot down.’ This became a more prominent part of the story.

̽��ֱ��Costa Concordia is eerily echoing this emphasis in the media frenzy over the culpability of the Italian captain, who was reported to be flirting rather than at his post in the hours before the shipwreck. Whatever the investigation reveals, it is clear that shipwrecks have long been used as a jumping off point for asserting hierarchies of ethnic or gender difference; we must be careful not to allow ethnic stereotypes to be used uncritically. Nor should we take the past as a period in which values of chivalry and women’s precedence were widely agreed upon or practiced.

Lucy Delap is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Her paper “Thus does man prove his fitness to be the master of things”: Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain’, appeared in Cultural and Social History, volume 3, 2006. Lucy’s book Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain was published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press in 2011.

Romantic notions of heroism - the captain refusing to leave his sinking ship, women and children being ushered to safety - have been shattered by reports emerging from the Costa Concordia. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� academic Dr Lucy Delap sets last week’s tragic events within a historical context of shipwreck that encompasses changing perceptions of class and gender.

‘Women and children first’ was much more contested in the past than today’s news coverage would have us believe.

Sir Cam

Dr Lucy Delap

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