heat wave
by: ebrahim
Total views: 55
Word Count: 577
Risk Versus Disaster
Risk and disaster differ in significant ways, only two of which I will comment on here.
First, people locate each differently with respect to time. Second, each differs with respect
to how people acquire knowledge of its characteristics. Disasters involve the past. The threat
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that they possess is over (except for relatively quick-following "secondary" disasters such as
earthquake aftershocks and tsunamis, which themselves soon become part of the past). This
means that knowledge of the details of disasters (when it occurred, where, how many were
killed, what one was doing when it struck, etc.) can be obtained through observation, either
direct or indirect (e.g., from others including news media). Risk, on the other hand, is about
the future. The threat is yet to come. Hence, the character of events is unknown in their
important details. They can only be inferred from past events that are deemed comparable.
Thus, the social meaning of time is central to the distinction between disaster and risk and
to the understanding of risk itself. When we study disasters, we ask people what they did.
When we study risk, we ask people what they are doing in the present about an uncertain
future.
For most, the "heat wave" was an uncomfortably hot weekend, perhaps even memorable in a trivial way, but certainly not life-threatening. But in a tragedy that quickly became a worldwide event, the heat wave proved deadly for the city's socially isolated, low-income elderly. Officially, the deaths of 739 people were blamed on the heat, a toll exceeded only by the Eastland disaster in twentieth-century Illinois history.
In an exceptionally well-constructed and well-argued book, Eric Klinenberg brings the careful eye of a sociologist to construct a "social autopsy" of the disaster. He describes the specific social and political factors that created an eminently preventable tragedy. The book crushes superficial or dismissive explanations of the heat wave deaths as "inevitable" and then forces inspection of ways communities are organized and of how the decisions of local governments are reached. The book is about far more than the weather; it is about how we "live and die in the cities of today." (xiii) Klinenberg puts the ethical and policy issue bluntly: "When hundreds of people die slowly, alone and at home, unprotected by friends and family and unassisted by the state, it is a sign of social breakdown in which communities, neighborhoods, networks, government agencies, and the media charged with signaling warnings are all implicated." (32) In short, the heat wave was hardly a "natural" disaster but instead a socially constructed one.
In the case of Durian typhoon we have to look at the sociological effects of this typhoon on people in philipine.For a society there will be long term effects and short term effects. Short term effects of a natural disaster like this could be violence and friends in a society forgetting eachother or fighting each other for water and food.this will cut the ties between people in a society and make it into situation of a jungle where society has no meaning and its all about surviving.Long term effects are when children lose their parents and husbands loose their wives.The children grown with single parent or no parent will be underdeveloped personally. Some of them may have to stop studying in order to make a living.These problems will lead to bigger problems when these people grow up. The crime rate will increase.The uneducated labour will be very inefficient and marginal revenue per labour will decrease which will lead to economic losses.
Author:M.Ebrahim Sadeghian F.
www.TheWritersOnline.com
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About the Author
M.Ebrahim Sadeghian F.
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