Thinking About Vunlnerability
This type of vulnerability refers to health problems or disabilities that make disasters harder to survive.
What is physical vulnerability?
This type of mitigation uses things like levees, floodwalls, and seawalls to reduce flooding.
Answer: What is structural mitigation?
This federal program was created in 1968 to provide flood insurance in disaster-prone areas.
Answer: What is the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)?
This term refers to a community’s ability to “bounce back” after a disaster with minimal long-term damage.
Answer: What is disaster resiliency?
These two major hurricanes are used in the reading as examples of how race and class affect disaster recovery in the United States.
Answer: What are Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy?
This evacuation strategy lets cars drive the “wrong way” on highways during emergencies to increase traffic flow.
Answer: What is contraflow?
Economists use this term to describe when insurance causes people to take greater risks.
Answer: What is moral hazard?
These giant barriers, modeled after the Netherlands’ Delta Works, have been proposed to protect cities from storm surges.
Answer: What are storm surge gates?
People living near beaches, dams, levees, or wildfire-prone hills are experiencing this type of condition.
Answer: What are unsafe conditions?
This type of mitigation focuses on keeping people and property out of dangerous areas in the first place.
Answer: What is nonstructural mitigation?
Homeowners’ insurance usually covers this type of hurricane damage, while the NFIP covers flood damage.
Answer: What is wind damage?
This nonstructural mitigation strategy involves buying vulnerable properties and turning the land into parks or wetlands.
Answer: What is managed retreat?
Researchers say disaster vulnerability and poverty have this kind of relationship in many Latin American countries because each one worsens the other.
Answer: What is double causality?
According to the reading, communities often focus on these two types of mitigation instead of long-term nonstructural solutions.
Answer: What are structural and infrastructural mitigation?
This California wildfire completely destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018 and killed 85 people.
Answer: What is the Camp Fire?
After Hurricane Sandy, residents of this Staten Island neighborhood successfully pushed for government buyouts of their homes.
Answer: What is Oakwood Beach?
During Hurricane Harvey, this group made up about 70% of the deaths, mostly from drowning in vehicles.
Answer: Who are men?
Researchers say levees and seawalls can create this dangerous effect by making people feel safer than they really are.
Answer: What is a false sense of security?
Congressional attempts to raise NFIP rates to reflect the true level of flood danger are called this kind of rates.
Answer: What are actuarial rates?
The reading argues that disasters are not these, because social inequalities still strongly affect who suffers the most.
Answer: What are great equalizers?