Response to Technological Disasters

Paper Summary:

Centers on 2 incidents. Exxon Valdez wreck & oil spill & Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. Examines how individual communities, governements & other social institutions responded to the accidents. Political, social, economic & historical context. Envioronmental effect. Public health.

From the Paper:

"One might think that there is a standardized response to disaster, something imprinted on our brains through evolutionary processes. We should be programmed to respond to the eruption of terrible events just as we are programmed to fight or flight by millennia of natural selection.
But there are dramatically different responses depending both on an individual's personality and - perhaps even more importantly - by the nature of the disaster. People rush into burning buildings to save children with seemingly no thought to save themselves. But when they see a person dying from AIDS - or Ebola - they turn and flee, even when the risk to themselves is far less. This has to do partly with poor risk assessment skills, and partly it seems to do with culturally ingrained values. We may well be taught from childhood onward that we have a moral..."

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