Preliminary Papers
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Browsing Preliminary Papers by Author "Aguirre, Benigno E."
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Item 1999 Floods in Veracruz and the Paradigm of Vulnerability(Disaster Research Center, 2004) Aguirre, Benigno E.; Macias, Jesus M.This study examines the distribution of warnings and of services to victims of the 1999 floods in Veracruz, Mexico and offers a criticism of vulnerability as the dominant paradigm guiding national and international disaster-related programs. It has sections on the vulnerability paradigm, the 1999 flood, and the methods used in the analysis. The information comes from a survey of 385 head of households flood victims residing in three cities in the north of Veracruz, Poza Rica, Gutierrez Zamora, and Tecolutla. The results indicate that government services to the population threatened by the floods were almost nonexistent. Radio programming and personal relations with friends, neighbors, and kin, were the most important sources of warnings about the hazard. The respondents’ integration in their communities and the social organizations of these communities were key determinants of their receipt of warnings and assistance such as vertical evacuation sheltering. Authorities should place much greater emphasis than they do now on facilitating the use of vertical evacuation and the service of radio stations providing information to communities at risk of extreme weather events, improving their weather and disaster-preparedness programming and making radios available to people in areas at risk of severe weather and other hazards. Disaster preparedness and mitigation need to be made part of their efforts in community development, encouraging the growth of social capital that can be used for disaster response and recovery. The implications of these findings for the continued use of the paradigm of vulnerability that provides guidelines to present-day international assistance at times of disasters are considered.Item Can Sustainable Development Sustain Us?(Disaster Research Center, 2001) Aguirre, Benigno E.This paper presents a review of Disasters by Design, the recent, influential second U.S. national assessment of research on natural and technological hazards that takes stock of the disciplinary knowledge and policy issues in the field of disasters. It identifies four analytical matters left unresolved in its central theme on the importance of sustainable development for disaster mitigation, having to do with the dual emphasis on the local and on the global, cultural change, the implicit assumptions that planners and social engineers know best, and the consensual model of politics. It also identifies some practical problems that the adoption of a sustainable development framework advocated by the report may pose for the specialty.Item Communicating Risk and Warnings: An Integrated and Interdisciplinary Research Approach(Disaster Research Center, 2004) Rodriguez, Havidan; Diaz, Walter; Aguirre, Benigno E.Forecasting weather has become a very important scientific, economic, and political endeavor. With the development of new and enhanced technology, weather forecasting skills have improved significantly in the United States and internationally (NRC, 1999 and 2003). However, weather forecasting is a probabilistic science and many uncertainties still remain (see NSF, 2002). Indeed, despite significant improvements in our ability to predict the weather in the short- and long-term, recent experiences with natural hazards show that we continue to confront important challenges regarding lead times, false alarm rates, the accuracy and reliability of the information that is being communicated, and our ability to elicit the appropriate response from the public. As lead time in issuing severe weather warnings to threatened populations increases with improvements in weather monitoring, detection, and mass communication technology, the social and organizational features of integrated warning systems become paramount as key factors in saving lives and reducing damages to property. There is a need to continue to expand our knowledge regarding how people and organizations perceive and react to weather forecasts and warnings. This knowledge must be integrated with other technical information on weather forecasts already available so as to make weather information more useful to society. This paper explores the role of technology, the media, and interdisciplinary research in the communication of warnings, risk, and disaster information. We also focus on how researchers can communicate the importance, value, and contribution of hazard and disaster research to the end-user community, including emergency management organizations and the general public. We argue that significant changes need to occur in the existing scientific paradigms in order to incorporate the needs and problems that the end-user communities confront. Further, we provide a critical analysis on the importance and potential contributions of interdisciplinary research in the disaster field. We emphasize the need to develop an integrated research model to communicate risk and warnings, which takes into account the new and emerging technology, the role of the media, and the changing socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the general population.Item A Conceptual Framework for Collective Behavior and Action and Its Application to U.S. Student Riots in The 1990s(Disaster Research Center, 2001) Aguirre, Benigno E.The paper offers a conceptualization of collective behavior and action incidents, defining them as suffused by socio-cultural emergence, inextricably dramaturgical in nature, exhibiting a limited range of dominant emotions, carried out by five master social units (masses, publics, associational networks, social movement organizations, and small groups), and located both in time and space as well as in social spaces reflecting issues associated with master categories of age, race/ethnicity, class/occupation, gender/sex, and ethnocentrism/nationalism. It then applies the scheme to student riots in the 1990s in the United States.Item A Critical Review Of Emergency Evacuation Simulation Models(Disaster Research Center, 2004) Santos, Gabriel; Aguirre, Benigno E.Item Disaster in Cuba(Disaster Research Center, 2004) Aguirre, Benigno E.The article offers a criticism of the point of view that other countries should emulate disaster programs in Cuba as well as that the removal of Mr. Castro from power will bring about a failed state system that will precipitate a complex humanitarian emergency in which the United States government would coordinate the response of the international community. It outlines Cuba’s disaster practices, the possibility of famine, and non-governmental organizations working in Cuba as important harbingers of civil society.Item Education, Sustainable Development, and Disasters: An Interactive and Collaborative Approach(Disaster Research Center, 2005) Rodriguez, Havidan; Aguirre, Benigno E.Item Homeland Security Warnings: Lessons Learned And Unlearned(Disaster Research Center, 2003) Aguirre, Benigno E.Item Information Seeking Behavior in Collective Surges: Testing Alternative Collective Behavior Formulations(Disaster Research Center, 2002) Aguirre, Benigno E.This paper tests a set of predictions regarding information seeking behavior in collective surges derived from models of rumors by Shibutani, Knof, and McPhail. Data for the analysis comes from a random sample of 1,042 households in Memphis, Tennessee surveyed by the Disaster Research Center prior to Iben Browning's December 3rd 1990 prediction of an imminent massive earthquake in the New Madrid fault zone. Result suppport McPhail's hypothesis that the network of relationships available to people is an important determinant of their information seeking behavior in situations of collective preoccupations as well as Shibutani's prediction of a positive association between the use of formal and informal sources of information. The results fail to support Knopf's prediction that information seeking is impacted by pre-existing generalized beliefs. Attention to the logistics of accessibility and microparticipation is a useful supplementation to the emphasis on the use of the mass media for understanding informal information seeking activities during collective preoccupations.Item The Invisible Dead in the World Trade Center Attack: Another Case Study of How Social Factors Affect and Distort Disaster Statistics(Disaster Research Center, 2005) Aguirre, Benigno E.; Quarantelli, E. L.This essay uses information from Latino immigrants who were victims in the World Trade Center (WTC) to illustrate the operation of counting as a central, theoretical issue. It examines the present day emphases on the operation of organizations, their lack of coordination, and fraud, which are used to explain the lack of validity of disaster mortality statistics. It complements these explanations with Alfred Schutz's phenomenological perspective, examining the social categories and understandings that were used to create the official list of the dead by the City of New York, the link of the official list with receipt of money from charities, and the work of Asociación Tepeyac de New York in developing an unofficial list of Latino victims some of whom were excluded from the official list. Results show that the Mexican mass media exaggerated the numbers of Mexican dead by a ratio of 15 to 1. Contrary to mass media reports, the Asociación also assisted people who were included in the official count of the dead. The list of the Asociación is overwhelmingly a list of male names, but neither gender has a greater proportion of exclusion from the official list. Exclusion from the official list occurs more often to Mexican men recently arrived in the country and earning a living in the underground economy of Lower Manhattan. A significantly greater proportion of Mexican victims are excluded from the official list if compared to Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. The social invisibility of some of the Latino victims is not caused solely by structural factors such as the operation of bureaucracies and systemic discrimination, nor is solely the effect of the categories used to organize the count of the dead; it is also a function of the social behavior of Latino immigrants and of their surviving kin during the course of their immigration and incorporation into the United States. The paper concludes with some suggestions about how statistics on disaster deaths can be improved.Item Local Search and Rescue Teams in the United States(Disaster Research Center, 2006) Denver, Megan; Perez, Jaime; Aguirre, Benigno E.Arguably one of the least appreciated actors in disaster response is local search and rescue (SAR) teams, despite their importance in saving lives. In contrast to fire and police departments, federal Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) taskforces, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other well known disaster response organizations, local SAR teams have not received much recognition or support at the national level. This is the case even in the contemporary context in which "homeland security" and "improvements of resiliency" in American institutions are buzzwords. Their "invisibility" is also reflected in the dearth of research literature about them in the field of emergency management and the social sciences of disasters. An exception to this is the work by Lois (1999), who looked at the dynamics of a local SAR team and provided an in-depth view of the authority structure and the slow advancement of new members in the hierarchy of the group. Earlier, Drabek (1981) also provided insights by surveying local SAR teams in Washington and Wyoming to better understand attitudes towards regulations, agency jurisdictions, SAR funding, and issues of legal liability. While these efforts begin to explore important questions in this understudied field, the current study attempts to give a summary view of the main features of this network of responders.Item On the Concept of Resilience(Disaster Research Center, 2006) Aguirre, Benigno E.The concept of resilience comprises physical, biological, psychological, social, and cultural systems. Resilience has been defined in many ways (for example, see Wisner, et al. 2005), to include an ability to "bounce back" and continue to function; predict and prevent potential problems; improvise and recombine resources in new ways; develop a collective and shared vision of dangers and what to do about them; and constant monitoring of threatening contextual conditions (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003). For our purpose, we define resilience as physical, biological, personality, social, and cultural systems' capability to effectively absorb, respond, and recover from an internally or externally induced set of extraordinary demands. The complexity inherent in the concept of resilience derives from these multiple systems in which it can be observed in simultaneity, which often do not have the same levels of resillience, and from the interactions and inter-effects that take place among these systems.Item Organizational Adaptation to Crises: Mechanisms of Coordination and Structural Change(Disaster Research Center, 1976-11) Dynes, Russell R.; Aguirre, Benigno E.Item Societal Factors Involved on Risk Mitigation Policy: Challenges to Seismic Retrofitting of Hospital Buildings(Disaster Research Center, 2008) Sousa e Silva, Delta; Aguirre, Benigno E.This paper discusses the recurrent problems that emerge in the seismic risk mitigation policy process. It offers a definition of risk mitigation, and examines its application to earthquake threat, particularly the challenges to mitigation adoption and implementation processes. California experience with the application of legislation (SB1953) mandating seismic structural and non-structural retrofitting of hospital facilities illustrates these problems and also shows how stakeholders, who are supposed to act in accordance with the law, have adjusted to the new regulatory environment. This case is illustrative of how well-intended rules may fail in their applicability because of a failure in anticipating undesirable and unintended outcomes. It brings attention to the embeddedness of mitigation efforts on institutional processes, and the importance of taking into account the specificities of target-areas and organizations when investing on seismic safety rehabilitation and retrofitting.Item Sustainable Development As Collective Surge(Disaster Research Center, 2001) Aguirre, Benigno E.The paper argues that the recent, sudden popularity of the use of the concept of sustainable development in the sciences has the characteristics of a collective surge or fad. The first part of the paper examines the characteristics of fads and proposes a conceptual framework for collective behavior that incorporates fads or collective surges. The second part shows the applicability of this proposed collective behavior framework to understand the surge of sustainable development.Item A Test Of Culture Opposition's Power Grid(Disaster Research Center, 2001) Aguirre, Benigno E.The paper uses culture of opposition theory to identify ten attributes of cultures of opposition (CO) in state polities. It then uses these general attributes of CO to construct a measure of knowledge of the culture of opposition (CO) and of a set of covariates using information from Cuba. Six theoretically derived dimensions are used to group the sixteen covariates included in the OLS models. They are oppositional politics, respondents' perceptions and activities in relation to the dissidence in the island, the use of mass media, integration with state, evaluation of life in Cuba, and the economic situation of the respondents. OLS is used to model the experiences of 1023 Cuban immigrants who participated in the recently completed survey "Measuring Cuban Opinion Project." Six hypotheses are tested. The results support most of the predictions. Knowledge of the culture of opposition is: a.positively associated with the extent to which respondents feel repressed by the state and with their tendency to perceive people to be opposed to the government's repressive tactics; b. is positively associated with the extent to which respondents develop dissidents' self-conceptions, participate in dissident organizations, and perceive people as respecting the dissidents; c. negatively correlated with lack of access to news from abroad; d. negatively associated with membership in state organizations prior to emigrating from Cuba; e. positively associated with hatred of the leaders and organization of the Cuban state and if respondents thought that there had not been advances in public health and education. Contrary to the prediction, knowledge of the culture declines among respondents who faced great difficulties and were engaged in marginal, quasi-illegal occupations. The conclusion spells out the theoretical implications of these findings.Item Testing Shibutani’s Prediction Of Information Seeking Behavior In Rumor(Disaster Research Center, 2001) Tierney, Kathleen J.; Aguirre, Benigno E.The paper tests a set of predictions regarding information seeking behavior in rumors derived from models of rumors by Shibutani and others. Data for the analysis comes from a random sample of 1,042 households in Memphis, Tennessee surveyed by the Disaster Research Center prior to December 3rd 1990 in connection with the Iben Browning prediction of an imminent massive earthquake in the New Madrid fault zone. The results support Shibutani’s prediction of a positive association between the use of formal and informal sources of information; Knopf’s prediction that rumors are part of pre-existing generalized beliefs in a community; and McPhail’s hypothesis that the network of relationships available to people is an important determinant of their search for and use of informal information. These findings indicate that Shibutani’s model of rumors should be supplemented by attention to the importance of cultural context and the logistics of accessibility and micro-participation. Unexpectedly, a large number of respondents did not use either formal or informal sources of information about the earthquake threat.Item Thorns of Seismic Safety: Risk Mitigation Policy(Disaster Research Center, 2008) Aguirre, Benigno E.; Sousa e Silva, DeltaThis paper's aim is to identify and discuss some societal problems that emerge in risk mitigation policy processes associated with earthquake, using the experience of California with SB 1953, the state building code. The intent is to bring attention to the embeddedness of mitigation efforts in social processes and the often unexpected and unintended effects of such efforts. The California experience with SB1953 is an excellent example of how no mitigation action is possible without formal efforts at "changing the rules" by willing policy leaders and legislators who may not be able to estimate the unwelcome impact of their well intended actions, in this case the mandated retrofitting of hospital buildings. Earthquake mitigation policies imply the involvement of diverse stakeholders, such as owners and tenants, seismic experts, government officials and planners, land speculators and developers. Each of these categories of people has specific interests. Even when they share the values of "life safety" they may react differently to the social and economic rehabilitation costs. To understand these differences in perception of various categories of people involved in mitigation, in this paper we explore the logic of building retrofitting from the perspective of hospital administrators, to show that it is an important albeit only partial determinant of the ability of hospitals to perform their services. There is considerable uncertainty as to what is the most efficacious way for hospitals to invest money to protect against earthquakes, and doubt that structural retrofitting solutions are cost effective. There is also consensus among hospital administrators and managers that the vulnerability of their hospitals is not solely a matter of seismically unsound buildings but also results in part from the specific characteristics of the hazard and their linkages to the social organizations of communities. Hospitals in the sample did non-structural seismic retrofitting of their physical plant to improve the earthquake-related safety of buildings, and complied with seismic code requirements for all new buildings, but for lack of financial resources largely ignored seismic structural retrofitting of existing buildings. Hospitals incorporate seismic retrofitting as part of their programs, but they optimize rather than maximize, doing what they can with the resources they have available. All mandated disaster mitigation efforts should involve a comprehensive and detailed assessment of the multiple effects such laws could produce, with emphasis on the institutions that would be more directly impacted by the laws and regulations, as well as remedies to the collateral damage the mitigation could create.