The social construction of disasters in the United States: A historical and cultural phenomenon.

Introduction: Societal risks from hazards are continually increasing. Each year, disasters cause thousands of deaths and cost billions of dollars. In the first half of 2011, the United States endured countless disasters-winter snowstorms in the Midwest and Northeast; severe tornadic weather in the Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri; flash flooding in Nashville; flooding along the Mississippi River; an earthquake on the East Coast, wildfires in Texas, and Hurricane Irene.

Assessing reverse 911®: a case study of the 2007 San Diego wildfires.

In October 2007, 250,000 residents of San Diego County were forced to evacuate as wildfires burned 62 miles(2) in 24 hours. In 2005, the Sheriff's Department invested in Reverse 911® to contact residents upon emergencies. The system was used during this wildfire, and by the following midday, had made 394,915 calls.

A portrait of the Delta: enduring hope and enduring despair.

Place is an integral part of human identity. Not only does place define where people are, but it also helps determine who they are. The basic methods of answering questions concerning locational features often fail to detail the relationships between one feature and another.

Preliminary evidence for an emerging nonmetropolitan mortality penalty in the United States.

We discovered an emerging non-metropolitan mortality penalty by contrasting 37 years of age-adjusted mortality rates for metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan US counties. During the 1980s, annual metropolitan-nonmetropolitan differences averaged 6.2 excess deaths per 100,000 nonmetropolitan population, or approximately 3600 excess deaths; however, by 2000 to 2004, the difference had increased more than 10 times to average 71.