 |
|
NIEHS launches website with information for assessing environmental hazards from Hurricane Katrina
September 12, 2005A new website with a Global Information System will provide valuable information for assessing environmental hazards caused by Hurricane Katrina. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), one of the National Institutes of Health, created the website to provide the most up-to-date data to public health and safety workers on contaminants in flood waters, infrastructure and industry maps, as well as demographic information for local populations.
The NIEHS Hurricane Katrina Information Website, accessible at http://www-apps.niehs.nih.gov/katrina, provides information on assessing and evaluating hundreds of potentially hazardous environmental pollutants that may pose a risk to human health. The website draws from information that NIEHS has acquired from a variety of sources including its research programs, as well as through its Superfund Basic Research Program, Worker Education and Training Program, and Environmental Health Science Centers.
The website also includes a link to a new Global Information System (GIS) that NIEHS is developing with several academic partners.
The GIS will contain layers of data, including the locations of refineries, oil pipelines, industrial facilities, Superfund sites, Toxic Release Inventory Data, agricultural operations, as well as maps and satellite images of schools, neighborhoods, and medical facilities, that will help assess the short and long effects of Katrina on the Gulf region.
"With a disaster of this magnitude, people need many things, including easy access to science based information so they can make informed decisions to further reduce their risk of harm," said NIEHS Director Dr. David Schwartz. "Consolidating information in this new website is one vehicle that NIEHS is using to help our fellow citizens."
Information in the GIS, such as the demographics of populations before Katrina will be helpful as health officials treat displaced citizens who may have been previously exposed to toxicants. Subsequent phases will provide more in-depth information to fully assess exposures and make informed decisions about risk of disease.
"This GIS has the capability of being a powerful tool to fully assess and evaluate the short- and long-term environmental health effects of Hurricane Katrina. It will help us all make informed decisions about the uncertainty of risk of exposure and potentially enable us to better understand the links between exposure and disease, "said William A. Suk, Ph.D., Director of the NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program.
Other partners working with NIEHS in the development of the various phases of the GIS include Duke University, University of California at San Diego, University of Kentucky, Johns Hopkins, University of Arizona, Boston University, Columbia University, Research Triangle Institute and Harvard University.
The Hurricane Katrina Information Website also provides other ongoing NIEHS efforts related to recovery efforts, including collaborations with other federal agencies.
NIH/National Institute of Environmental Health Sci
The GIS will contain layers of data, including the locations of refineries, oil pipelines, industrial facilities, Superfund sites, Toxic Release Inventory Data, agricultural operations, as well as maps and satellite images of schools, neighborhoods, and medical facilities, that will help assess the short and long effects of Katrina on the Gulf region.
"With a disaster of this magnitude, people need many things, including easy access to science based information so they can make informed decisions to further reduce their risk of harm," said NIEHS Director Dr. David Schwartz. "Consolidating information in this new website is one vehicle that NIEHS is using to help our fellow citizens."
Information in the GIS, such as the demographics of populations before Katrina will be helpful as health officials treat displaced citizens who may have been previously exposed to toxicants. Subsequent phases will provide more in-depth information to fully assess exposures and make informed decisions about risk of disease.
"This GIS has the capability of being a powerful tool to fully assess and evaluate the short- and long-term environmental health effects of Hurricane Katrina. It will help us all make informed decisions about the uncertainty of risk of exposure and potentially enable us to better understand the links between exposure and disease, "said William A. Suk, Ph.D., Director of the NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program.
Other partners working with NIEHS in the development of the various phases of the GIS include Duke University, University of California at San Diego, University of Kentucky, Johns Hopkins, University of Arizona, Boston University, Columbia University, Research Triangle Institute and Harvard University.
The Hurricane Katrina Information Website also provides other ongoing NIEHS efforts related to recovery efforts, including collaborations with other federal agencies.
NIH/National Institute of Environmental Health Sci
Hurricane Katrina Current Events and Hurricane Katrina News RSSHopkins doctor/disaster expert says resource problems in Haiti required ethical decision-making
In an essay published in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Johns Hopkins emergency physician outlines how he and other physicians who worked in Haiti after the earthquake had to make emotionally difficult ethical decisions daily in the face of a crushing wave of patients and inadequate medical resources.
Haiti reconstruction will require local input
Destruction in Haiti, the result of a January 12 earthquake, is staggering. The majority of the capital city of Port-au-Prince will have to be rebuilt from scratch.
A forensic analysis of Hurricane Katrina's impact: methods and findings
A recent special edition of the Elsevier journal Ocean Engineering provides an analysis of the impact of Hurricane Katrina and an overview of the lessons learned in the aftermath of the disaster.
Post-Katrina New Orleans safety-net clinic patients report more efficient, affordable health care
A new Commonwealth Fund survey of safety-net clinic patients in New Orleans finds that, despite being disproportionately low-income and uninsured, these patients had fewer problems affording care and fewer instances of medical debt and inefficient care than most U.S. adults.
Study shows people's racial biases can skew perceptions of how much help victims need
When assessing the amount of help someone needs, people's perceptions can be skewed by their racial biases, according to a Kansas State University study.
Study shows serious emotional disturbances among children after Katrina
A team made up of mental health professionals, emergency response experts, and researchers from several universities, including Virginia Tech, has published the results of a study that shows serious emotional disturbances among children who were affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Brain imaging shows kids' PTSD symptoms linked to poor hippocampus function
Psychological trauma leaves a trail of damage in a child's brain, say scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Their new study gives the first direct evidence that children with symptoms of post-traumatic stress suffer poor function of the hippocampus, a brain structure that stores and retrieves memories.
Researchers can predict hurricane-related power outages
Using data from Hurricane Katrina and four other destructive storms, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M universities say they have found a way to accurately predict power outages in advance of a hurricane.
Water scarcity will create global security concerns
Water scarcity as a result of climate change will create far-reaching global security concerns, says Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
New publication offers security tips for WiMAX networks
Government agencies and other organizations planning to use WiMAX- Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access-networks can get technical advice on improving the security of their systems from a draft computer security guide prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
More Hurricane Katrina Current Events and Hurricane Katrina News Articles
 |
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne (Author) Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive. As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified... |
 |
NOVA - Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City Starring: Stacy Keach; Peter Thomas (VI); Don Wescott Directed By: Nova On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing at least 1,300, destroying over 600,000 houses, and turning downtown New Orleans into an uninhabitable swamp. In a compelling hour-by-hour reconstruction of the ferocious storm, NOVA exposes crucial failures in preparation and engineering that led to the worst disaster in U.S. history. The film probes the titanic forces behind hurricanes and the latest technology for tracking and predicting them, showing how scientists precisely foresaw the impact of a strong hurricane on New Orleans a year before Katrina struck. NOVA investigates the fatal flaws in New Orleans’ levees and the huge challenge posed by protecting and rebuilding the city. As global temperatures rise, are killer storms like Katrina a growing... |
 |
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose (Author) Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators. Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life. |
 |
The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina--the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist by Ivor van Heerden (Author), Mike Bryan (Author) The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy—from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane Center After warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city. |
 |
When the Levees Broke - A Requiem In Four Acts (Documentary) Starring: Spike Lee, Sam Pollard One year after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, director Spike Lee presents a four-hour, four-part chronicle recounting, through words and images, one of our country?s most profound natural disasters. In addition to revisiting the hours leading up to the arrival of Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane before it hit the coast of Louisiana, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts tells the personal stories of those who lived to tell about it, at the same time exploring the underbelly of a nation where the divide along race and class lines has never been more pronounced. |
 |
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security by Christopher Cooper (Author), Robert Block (Author) “[A] tightly crafted, very readable book . . . the best in-depth contemporary analysis we are going to get.”—Stephen Flynn, The Washington Post When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would bring. In this searing indictment of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block take readers inside FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement during the crisis—the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, and the individuals who saw that the system was broken but did nothing to fix it. In this award-winning and critically acclaimed book, Cooper and Block reconstruct the crucial days before and after the storm hit, laying bare the... |
 |
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson (Author) When Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands were left behind to suffer the ravages of destruction, disease, and even death. The majority of these people were black; nearly all were poor. Displaying the intellectual rigor, political passion, and personal empathy that have won him acclaim and fans all across the color line, Michael Eric Dyson offers a searing assessment of the meaning of Hurricane Katrina. With this clarion call Dyson warns us that we can only find redemption as a society if we acknowledge that Katrina was more than an engineering or emergency response failure. What's at stake is no less than the future of democracy. |
 |
National Geographic - Inside Hurricane Katrina From the creators of critically acclaimed Inside 9/11 comes another powerful journalistic account, Inside Hurricane Katrina. Go beyond the round-the-clock news coverage for a comprehensive look behind the devastation caused by nature's fury and human error. How did this happen? Can it happen again? Why weren't emergency personnel fully ready to respond to a real disaster? Using comprehensive analysis of events, hours of government audio tapes, and personal interviews, National Geographic takes viewers into the eye of Katrina to uncover the decisions and circumstances that determined the fate of the Gulf residents. |
 |
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley (Author) In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes—followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. |
 |
Time: Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Changed America by Editors of Time Magazine (Author) DESCRIPTION: On Sept. 2, 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate S.O.S." His city, one of America’s most historic and gracious urban centers, had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now 80% of it lay underwater, while some citizens huddled on rooftops waiting for rescue, and others turned the flooded streets into canals of anarchy. In the first decade of the 21st century, despair, disease and death had transformed a great American city into a scene of third-world privation, even as heroic rescue workers battled to save lives, restore order and aid the suffering. Now Time chronicles the story of the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history in Hurricane Katrina, An American Tragedy. Here, in stunning pictures and gripping first-hand accounts, is the terrible tale... |
| © 2010 BrightSurf.com |