Emergency Management

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A panel of experts play out a pandemic exercise on May 15 to demonstrate what policies and strategies the U.S. government should have in place. (Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security)

submitted by Mike Kraft - washingtonpost.com - by Lena H. Sun - May 30, 2018

A novel virus, moderately contagious and moderately lethal, has surfaced and is spreading rapidly around the globe . . .

. . . So began a recent day-long exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The simulation mixed details of past disasters with fictional elements to force government officials and experts to make the kinds of key decisions they could face in a real pandemic.

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A transmission tower and downed lines in the mountainous terrain of eastern Puerto Rico. Workers from the island and throughout the United States have worked to restore power after Hurricanes Irma and Maria last September.

It took months to restore electricity in Puerto Rico after hurricanes dealt a one-two punch. Many homes are still without power, and the system’s future is far from certain.

nytimes.com - by JAMES GLANZ and FRANCES ROBLES - Photographs by TODD HEISLER - May 6, 2018

 . . . After Maria and the hurricane that preceded it, called Irma, Puerto Rico all but slipped from the modern era . . .

 . . . an examination of the power grid’s reconstruction — based on a review of hundreds of documents and interviews with dozens of public officials, utility experts and citizens across the island — shows how a series of decisions by federal and Puerto Rican authorities together sent the effort reeling on a course that would take months to correct. The human and economic damage wrought by all that time without power may be irreparable.

Stack of school papers on a desk in an empty classroom in Puerto Rico.

cnn.com - by Nicole Chavez - April 6, 2018

Puerto Rico is closing 283 schools this summer following a sharp drop in enrollment in the past year, officials said.

Since May, schools have lost 38,762 students as the US territory works to rebuild following a devastating hurricane last year, the education department said in a statement.

"Half of the existing schools are at 60% of their capacity," it said. The department said only 828 schools will reopen in August.

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With a population of nearly 600,000, the settlement near Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh is the largest refugee camp in the world. Credit United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

More than half a million Rohingya refugees face looming disaster from floods and landslides when the first storms of the monsoon season hit their camp in Bangladesh.

nytimes.com - by SOMINI SENGUPTA and HENRY FOUNTAIN - MARCH 14, 2018

The world’s largest refugee camp, a temporary home to more than half a million people that sprawls precariously across barren hills in southeastern Bangladesh, faces a looming disaster as early as April when the first storms of the monsoon season hit, aid workers warn.

“It’s going to be landslides, flash floods, inundation,” said Tommy Thompson, chief of emergency support and response for the World Food Program. “It’s going to be a very, very challenging wet season. That’s if we don’t have a cyclone.”

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