Remove 2008 Remove Natural Hazard Remove Pandemic
article thumbnail

OUR CHALLENGE

Emergency Planning

On 12th October 2008 I attended a conference at which an epidemiologist stood up and said "My job is to tell you something you don't want to know, and ask you to spend money you haven't got on something you don't think is going to happen." I taught pandemic preparedness on the basis of his example for the next 12 years.

article thumbnail

Towards a Taxonomy of Disasters

Emergency Planning

While not independent of the magnitude of physical forces involved, it is not linearly related to them because it depends on the nature and size of the vulnerabilities that the physical forces act upon. Tierney (2008) provided a functional semantic classification of the size of extreme events (revised by Alexander 2016, p. )