Comment

Andy Marshall, Director of Civil Contingencies for Staffordshire, UK, and Member of CRJ’s Editorial Advisory Panel describes an initiative designed to support and develop strategic leaders’ capabilities to handle a multi-agency crisis

 Incident report

Further blow for Christchurch

Just a few months after the earthquake of September 2010, another quake in New Zealand struck near Christchurch. This time it killed 181 people and caused even more widespread damage, reports Emily Hough

Australia: Natural Disasters

Australia has experienced devastating floods and fires, writes Emily Hough, who describes how entire communities were cut off by raging waters

Australia: Air rescuers put to the test

Helicopter captain Mark Kempton describes rescue operations that saved 43 people in the Lockyer Valley, Australia.

Japan earthquake and tsunami

Japan’s great disaster

Emily Hough summarises events that began with a magnitude 9.0 quake, followed by a tsunami that swept miles inland, made even worse by freezing cold temperatures and compounded by the failure of a nuclear reactor

International USAR assistance

Hilary Phillips looks at how Rescue South Africa helped locate victims of the earthquake in Japan, while Emily Hough reports on US and New Zealand rescue operations

Crises, risks, interconnectivity

Systems failure

Arnold M Howitt and Herman B ‘Dutch’ Leonard of the Harvard Kennedy School, say the threat of large-scale systems failure requires emergency managers to take bold steps in order to be ready for more complex and extensive emergency response

New audits for new challenges

It is time to accept a disturbing reality: something is broken within our risk machinery. Patrick Lagadec, Director of Research at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, shows us how our preparedness audits must change accordingly

North Africa – civil unrest

Protecting foreign nationals

Lina Kolesnikova, Brussels-based Associate of CS&A Risk and Crisis Management Consultancy, looks at the issues behind the large scale evacuation of foreign nationals in an emergency. She says that both the host government and nations seeking to remove their citizens to safety must be aware of emergency response issues in advance

Profile

Singapore resilience

Emily Hough speaks to the Police and Civil Defence Forces in Singapore to find out how they ensure safety, security and resilience, both for the public and business communities

Transport resilience

Contentious toll system in South Africa

A proposed highway toll system in South Africa is scheduled to come into effect this June. Hilary Phillips checks on how this could affect the delivery of emergency services

Keeping airports running

Last issue, Emergency Planning Consultant Kevin Probert-Ehaver compared how different countries addressed disruption to their road transport networks during Europe’s severe winter weather in December 2010. Here, examines how airports handled heavy snow conditions

Fire response at Turkish Airlines crash

Marc van der Zwaard talks to Emily Hough about rescue operations when a passenger flight crashed into a boggy field just short of the runway at Schiphol Airport

Volcanic disruption

One year ago, a volcano on Mount Eyjafjallajökull began to spew volcanic ash to a height of 30,000 feet across a huge area of UK. This cloud led to the closure of European air space for six days amid safety fears for aircraft. Emily Hough looks at the lessons learnt

Focus on Victoria, Australia

Australia has become more focussed on issues of transport security and resilience in recent years, explains Tony Pearce, Executive Director, Security and Emergency Management

Transport

Incident at Changi Airport

In November 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 lost an engine and returned to Changi Airport to make a complex landing, further complicated by the failure of its fuel dumping system and one of its engines not shutting down when on the tarmac, writes Emily Hough

In depth

Resilience: The wider view

Dr Dave Sloggett looks at the time window of the July 2007 bombings, contending that a small shift in timing could have had a very different impact in terms of the casualty figures

Recovery management

Ed Blakely – Professor of Urban Policy at the United Sates Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, outlines a seven-step approach to disaster recovery, saying that future-proofing a community is a vital part of any reconstruction and that lessons must be learned from other disasters elsewhere in the world

Wildfire management

Central America has vast cultural riches, beautiful landscapes and high biological diversity, says Luis Diego Román Madriz, co-ordinator of the Natioanl Programme for Fire Management for the Ministry of Environment and Energy in Costa Rica. But these resources are often damaged by natural disasters, aggravated by human factors

Transit systems as terror targets

Andy Oppenheimer, Editor of Chemical and Biological Warfare Review, continues his series on terrorism by analysing the vulnerabilities of transport infrastructure to terrorist attacks

Books

Jay Levinson looks at a comprehensive overview of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami

Event reviews

Emily Hough reports from the IDER conference in Florence, Italy, and the IAFPA conference in Singapore

From the unknown

Generational gaps

Patrick Lagadec talks to Anita Chauvin about resilience after trauma, exploring how attitudes to, and preparedness for, disaster vary between the generations

EU civil protection

Double disaster, double assistance

To help Japan tackle the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, the European Union provided a co-ordinated double response, writes Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva

Lessons Learnt

Learning more from Golden Guardian

In this era of improvised explosive devices and terrorism directed at crippling economies and infrastructure, passenger and cargo transportation hubs are particularly vulnerable, writes J L Smither, Outreach and Operations Manager fro Lessons Learned Information Sharing, the US Department of Homeland Security/FEMA national online network

British Red Cross

Three crises in two months

Henry Makiwa gives an update on a busy period for the British Red Cross following civil unrest in Libya and the Ivory Coast, and the quake in Japan

Message alert

Technology provider Cassidian looks at how its innovative Communication Technology, first pioneered in the US, could work in the UK