In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

I recently had the opportunity to meet Claire B. Rubin for the first time in Washington. Claire is a long-time emergency management consultant and scholar whose work I have followed in several types of media for awhile, and I wanted to bring them to your attention. She is a co-editor (with John Harrald) of the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. an electronic web-based publication, which is celebrating his fifth anniversary this year. Each issue has at least one article that I find helpful and directly relevant to my citizen preparedness research. It carries an $225 academic subscription price but individual articles can be accessed with a temporary free registration.

Claire is also the author of Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2005, which is a fascinating collection of articles tracing how we got to the disaster policy and attitudes we have now. I recently read the book and found it hugely helpful in providing me with historical perspective on my work. The fact is that we didn’t always deal with disasters in a way we do at present – and history offers us some very constructive context in determing our policy and attitudes as we develop a new approach for the 21st Century. And finally, Rubin also creates graphic time-lines on disasters. It’s amazing both how many disasters there have been and how she manages to get them all displayed so clearly on one big sheet. To me, getting the disaster preparedness information to the public requires as many different formats and approaches as we can come up with — and Claire Rubin is in the multimedia forefront.