an ounce of prevention - alaska earthquake
TRANSCRIPT
212 an ounce of prevention chapter 11: victims 213
CHAPTER 11 – VICTIMSEvent: Alaska Earthquake
Date: 27 March 1964
Summary: The quake registered 8.6 on the Richter scale, larger than the 2010 quake in Haiti (7) and ten million times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Response came from 40,000 US service people stationed in Alaska and federal aid.
Result: At least 118 dead and $500 million in damage, which bankrupted the new state.
Lessons Learned: The power of nature. The need for volunteers and outside aid when an event destroys your ability to respond. A good crisis plan assumes that you will have fewer official responders and have to make use of volunteers. Happenstance—the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened exactly 25 years later.
“... an effective disaster response will accommodate not only the needs of those
directly affected (the victims) but also the needs of those indirectly affected
(victims’ relatives, friends, acquaintances and careers). ... [I]t is no longer accept-
able that the effectiveness of a disaster response be judged only on such criteria as
whether or not the perpetrators are caught, whether or not professional negli-
gence is proved, or how quickly ‘normal service’ is restored. A comprehensive and
holistic assessment requires that a disaster response also be judged on whether
those indirectly affected are treated humanely, sensitively and with equanimity”
— Scarman Centre for the Study of Public Order