escape routes. for eg. towns on coasts that are threatened by tsunami should have signs/paved roads/etc to higher ground. not all disasters are tsunamis though, so this is hard to extrapolate.
in the immediate aftermath: family+social solidarity, by the latter I mean inter ethnic. also decentralized government-remember how FEMA did so badly after Hurricane Katrina. from the little I know, disasters strike people unequally, so the generic responses so characteristic of bureaucracies are the last thing some survivors need.
now obviously there will be a shortage of necessities, taking food as an example, you need enough stored food and water that last for several days at least after the disaster, that and on a national level you need ubiquitous local food production+readily available ie cheap water sanitation tools. this might not be so feasible atm however, so better roads/faster methods of delivering necessities are top priority.
building on that, the ‘international community’ or at least close allies are a valuable asset that is quick to react and eager to help, this should always be accepted and well managed. underline ‘well managed’ many times, the billions of aid dollars wasted in the Wars on Afghanistan or Iraq are good indicators of how easy it is for money to ‘dissappear’ when local infrastructure as well as local government are devastated-regardless of who or what did it of course. a minor point here is that wars can be as damaging as ‘natural’ disasters so some cross-over there between situations.
also, lasers :)
..or lacking that lots of guns plus people who know how to use them.
Afaik, the government response after Katrina was unusually incompetent for a first world country, and it doesn’t make sense to draw general conclusions from it.
that it happened in the US should be enough reason to question how other countries would fare.
for example, the 1st world countries being comprised mostly of Europe, North America and Japan, when was the last time Europe got hit with something like Katrina? I’m not so well informed but I’d hazard a guess that their response wouldn’t be that much better given a similar situation.
1st world is an all encompassing term though, Japan is obviously much better prepared than themost when it comes to earthquakes/tsunamis simply because they occur more often there.
as it were, I think we do have very good ‘instructions’ on how to deal with such events, but not the organizational skills
see http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/
from the top of my head, in no particular order:
escape routes. for eg. towns on coasts that are threatened by tsunami should have signs/paved roads/etc to higher ground. not all disasters are tsunamis though, so this is hard to extrapolate.
in the immediate aftermath: family+social solidarity, by the latter I mean inter ethnic. also decentralized government-remember how FEMA did so badly after Hurricane Katrina. from the little I know, disasters strike people unequally, so the generic responses so characteristic of bureaucracies are the last thing some survivors need.
now obviously there will be a shortage of necessities, taking food as an example, you need enough stored food and water that last for several days at least after the disaster, that and on a national level you need ubiquitous local food production+readily available ie cheap water sanitation tools. this might not be so feasible atm however, so better roads/faster methods of delivering necessities are top priority.
building on that, the ‘international community’ or at least close allies are a valuable asset that is quick to react and eager to help, this should always be accepted and well managed. underline ‘well managed’ many times, the billions of aid dollars wasted in the Wars on Afghanistan or Iraq are good indicators of how easy it is for money to ‘dissappear’ when local infrastructure as well as local government are devastated-regardless of who or what did it of course. a minor point here is that wars can be as damaging as ‘natural’ disasters so some cross-over there between situations.
also, lasers :) ..or lacking that lots of guns plus people who know how to use them.
Afaik, the government response after Katrina was unusually incompetent for a first world country, and it doesn’t make sense to draw general conclusions from it.
that it happened in the US should be enough reason to question how other countries would fare. for example, the 1st world countries being comprised mostly of Europe, North America and Japan, when was the last time Europe got hit with something like Katrina? I’m not so well informed but I’d hazard a guess that their response wouldn’t be that much better given a similar situation. 1st world is an all encompassing term though, Japan is obviously much better prepared than themost when it comes to earthquakes/tsunamis simply because they occur more often there. as it were, I think we do have very good ‘instructions’ on how to deal with such events, but not the organizational skills see http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/
and this for comparison http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/earthquake.html
do ignore my first reply though, I wrote that after 40 hours of no sleep :)