Disaster Safety Quotes

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.

Everything can change in a heartbeat; it can slip away in an instant. Everything you trust, and treasure, whatever brings you comfort, comes at a terrible cost. Health is temporary; money disappears. Safety is nothing big an illusion.  So when the moment comes, and everything you depend upon changes, or perhaps someone you love disappears, or no longer loves you, must disaster follow? Or will you-somehow-adapt?

Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe. Repeatedly checking in with people to be sure they’re still safe will never create a lasting sense of safety.

There's no guarantee of disaster-free in any world religion, but love, faith and knowledge give men hope and willpower.

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster.

A few years ago I heard Jerome Kagan, a distinguished emeritus professor of child psychology at Harvard, say to the Dalai Lama that for every act of cruelty in this world there are hundreds of small acts of kindness and connection. His conclusion: "To be benevolent rather than malevolent is probably a true feature of our species." Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. Numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else's mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don't need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers - but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.

The events of the Titanic disaster can be seen as a symbol of what happens through overconfidence in technology, complacence, and a mindset of profits over people's safety.

How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!

The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the po­lice and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

Serial murders are a bit like natural disasters: in the scheme of things they are quite rare, but when they happen they demand our attention. They interest us for several reasons, but especially because they are so dramatically threatening, and they profoundly challenge our sense of our own everyday safety. [Todd R. Clear, Foreword]

Just when things looked their worse, they changed for the best. I have marveled often at the thin line that divides success from failure and the sudden turn that leads from apparently certain disaster to comparative safety.

(Captain Grubbs: "There he is, look at him! Goddamn, that son of a bitch is coming!")

The designers assumed that, so long as they followed the new instructions closely, human beings would act as promptly and unfailingly as any of the plant’s electromechanical safety systems.

If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.

Running had become her favorite mode of transport. She lived for that brief snap of true flight, both feet in the air at once. Jumping down a half-flight of stairs then catapulting down another. Aerial Aster. Sky Master Aster! Barely Avoiding Disaster Aster! There was less time lost in transport when she ran as fast as she could, no care for her own safety.

Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.’ I could see that Rosie could not place the line from The Bridges of Madison County that had produced such a powerful emotional reaction on the plane. She looked confused. ‘Don, what are you…what have you done to yourself?’ ‘I’ve made some changes.’ ‘Big changes.’ ‘Whatever behavioural modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for having you as my partner.’ Rosie made a downwards movement with her hand, which I could not interpret. Then she looked around the room and I followed her eyes. Everyone was watching. Nick had stopped partway to our table. I realised that in my intensity I had raised my voice. I didn’t care. ‘You are the world’s most perfect woman. All other women are irrelevant. Permanently. No Botox or implants will be required. ‘I need a minute to think,’ she said. I automatically started the timer on my watch. Suddenly Rosie started laughing. I looked at her, understandably puzzled at this outburst in the middle of a critical life decision. ‘The watch,’ she said. ‘I say “I need a minute” and you start timing. Don is not dead. 'Don, you don’t feel love, do you?’ said Rosie. ‘You can’t really love me.’ ‘Gene diagnosed love.’ I knew now that he had been wrong. I had watched thirteen romantic movies and felt nothing. That was not strictly true. I had felt suspense, curiosity and amusement. But I had not for one moment felt engaged in the love between the protagonists. I had cried no tears for Meg Ryan or Meryl Streep or Deborah Kerr or Vivien Leigh or Julia Roberts. I could not lie about so important a matter. ‘According to your definition, no.’ Rosie looked extremely unhappy. The evening had turned into a disaster. 'I thought my behaviour would make you happy, and instead it’s made you sad.’ ‘I’m upset because you can’t love me. Okay?’ This was worse! She wanted me to love her. And I was incapable. Gene and Claudia offered me a lift home, but I did not want to continue the conversation. I started walking, then accelerated to a jog. It made sense to get home before it rained. It also made sense to exercise hard and put the restaurant behind me as quickly as possible. The new shoes were workable, but the coat and tie were uncomfortable even on a cold night. I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed. On an impulse I retrieved the Daphne from the jacket and carried it in my hand for the remainder of the journey. There was rain in the air and my face was wet as I reached the safety of my apartment.

You think you're lost. You think you're headed for disaster. But this isn't true. Quiet your mind. Be patient. Let go.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.

the atomic chieftains of NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be enough to guarantee nuclear safety.

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.

The automatic safety systems would have, under normal circumstances, shut the reactor down a few times by now. At 01:22:30, minutes from disaster, Toptunov noticed the computer readings demanding that the reactor be shut down.

So rather than assuming long-term thinkers don’t have to deal with short-term nonsense, ask the question, “How can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?” Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.” Dealing with that reality requires a certain kind of alignment that’s easy to overlook.

For, under such an administration, every one would feel that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence. So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters, than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of Safety.

The 1991 report to the USSR State Committee for the Supervision of Safety in Industry and Nuclear Power also touched upon another critical issue - that there was no consistent top-level responsibility for the nuclear industry at all, which was one reason a dangerous reactor like the RBMK-1000 was approved for production.

Story time. In September of 1869, there was a terrible fire at the Avondale coal mine near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Over 100 coal miners lost their lives. Horrific conditions and safety standards were blamed for the disaster. It wasn’t the first accident. Hundreds of miners died in these mines every year. And those that didn’t, lived in squalor. Children as young as eight worked day in and out. They broke their bodies and gave their lives for nothing but scraps. That day of the fire, as thousands of workers and family members gathered outside the mine to watch the bodies of their friends and loved ones brought to the surface, a man named John Siney stood atop one of the carts and shouted to the crowd: Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with. That day, thousands of coal miners came together to unionize. That organization, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, managed to fight, for a few years at least, to raise safety standards for the mines by calling strikes and attempting to force safety legislation. ... Until 1875, when the union was obliterated by the mine owners. Why was the union broken so easily? Because they were out in the open. They were playing by the rules. How can you win a deliberately unfair game when the rules are written by your opponent? The answer is you can’t. You will never win. Not as long as you follow their arbitrary guidelines. This is a new lesson to me. She’s been teaching me so many things, about who I am. About what I am. What I really am. About what must be done. Anyway, during this same time, it is alleged a separate, more militant group of individuals had formed in secret. The Molly Maguires. Named after a widow in Ireland who fought against predatory landlords, the coal workers of Pennsylvania became something a little more proactive, supposedly assassinating over two dozen coal mine supervisors and managers. ... Until Pinkerton agents, hired by the same mine owners, infiltrated the group and discovered their identities. Several of the alleged Mollies ended up publicly hanged. Others disappeared. You get the picture. So, that’s another type of secret society. The yeah-we’re-terrorists-but-we-strongly-feel-we’re-justified-and-fuck-you-if-you-don’t-agree society. So, what’s the moral of this little history lesson? This sort of thing happens all day, every day across the universe. It happens in Big Ways, and it happens in little ways, too. The strong stomp on the weak. The weak fight back, usually within the boundaries of the rat trap they find themselves confined. They almost always remain firmly stomped. But sometimes, the weak gather in secret. They make plans. They work outside the system to effect change. Like the Mollies, they usually end up just as stomped as everyone else. But that’s just life. At least they fucking tried. They died with their boots on, as much as I hate that expression. They died with their boots on for their people, their family, not for some rich, nameless organization that gives no shits whether they live or die. Or go extinct. Or are trapped for a millennia after they’re done being used. In my opinion, that’s the only type of society that’s worth joining, worth fighting for. Sure, you’re probably gonna die. But if you find yourself in such a position where such an organization is necessary, what do you have to lose? How can you look at yourself if you don’t do everything you can? And that brings us to the door you’re standing in front of right now. What does all this have to do with what you’re going to find on the other side? Nothing!

It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days . . . to show how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous, how the councils of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger ... and how the middle course, adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may he found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster.

develop new safety regulations to protect them in the event of coolant loss; analyze what would happen in the event of a sharp rise in steam in the core; and devise a faster-acting emergency protection system. Despite their apparent urgency, the reactor designers failed to act on a single one of these directives, and Moscow promptly ordered more of the reactors to be built.

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

ALL JUNE, disasters in the Vendée. At different times the rebels have Angers, Saumur, Chinon; are narrowly defeated in the battle for Nantes, where off the coast the British navy waits to support them. The Danton Committee is not winning the war, nor can it promise a peace. If by autumn there is no relief from the news of disaster and defeat, the sansculottes will take the law into their own hands, turning on the government and their elected leaders. That at least is the feeling (Danton present or absent) in the chamber of the Committee of Public Safety, whose proceedings are secret. Beneath the black tricorne hat which is the badge of his office, Citizen Fouquier becomes more haggard each day, peering over the files of papers stacked on his desk, planning diversions for the days ahead: acquiring a lean and hungry look which he shares with the Republic herself.

I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.” “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?” “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.

Within 4 seconds, the reactor’s energy output had soared to several times its intended capacity. Runaway heat and pressure deep inside the core ruptured fuel channels, then water pipes, causing the pumps’ automatic safety valves to close. This stopped the flow of coolant, increasing the rate at which steam was forming from the core’s diminishing water supply. The reactor’s own safety valves attempted to vent the steam, but the pressure was too great and they, too, ruptured.

Most new Soviet nuclear plants in the planning or construction stages were either put on hold or cancelled altogether, while new, stricter safety regulations led several existing plants to be shut down for various reasons. By 1989, planned nuclear capacity had reduced by 28,000MWe (for comparison, Unit 4 at Chernobyl produced 1,000MWe and was the most powerful type of reactor at the time). The Government eventually scrapped all plans for future development of the RBMK design, beyond maintaining and improving those already in use.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

Valeriy Perevozchenko, the 38-year-old who witnessed the reactor valve-caps jumping up and down, was the first person of any authority to realise and accept what had really happened. He grabbed a radiometer rated for 1000 microroentgens - far higher than any normal reading. It went off the scale. Unbelievably, apart from one buried under rubble and another locked in a safe, there weren’t any devices for measuring anything higher at the plant, as the explosion had burnt out the powerful sensors around the building.132 Even standard safety equipment was locked up and inaccessible.133

Elite panic in disaster, as identified by the contemporary disaster scholars, is shaped by belief, belief that since human beings at large are bestial and dangerous, the believer must himself or herself act with savagery to ensure individual safety or the safety of his or her interests. The elites that panic are, in times of crisis, the minority, and understanding that could marginalize or even disarm them, literally and psychologically, as well as the media that magnify their message. This would help open the way to create a world more like the brief utopias that flash up in disaster.

Just after 1am on April 26th, 1986, a test was about to commence at Chernobyl’s Unit 4 reactor. What followed was the worst nuclear disaster in history. That night, the shift comprised of 176 men and women at the plant, along with 286 construction workers building Unit 5, a few hundred meters to the southeast. Unit 4’s control room operators, along with a representative of Donenergo - the state-owned electricity supplier and designer of the plant’s turbines - were testing a safety feature intended to allow the Unit to power itself for around a minute in the event of a total power failure.

The nuclear thing is harder to figure. The United States, according to a 1998 study by the Brookings Institution, spent nearly eight trillion in today’s dollars on nukes in the last half of the twentieth century, which represents something like a third of our total military spending in the Cold War. Just the nuke budget was more than that half-century’s federal spending on Medicare, education, social services, disaster relief, scientific research (of the non-nuclear stripe), environmental protection, food safety inspectors, highway maintenance, cops, prosecutors, judges, and prisons … combined.

With his reputation in tatters, his health ravaged by radiation absorbed at Chernobyl, his disillusionment with his country’s unwillingness to focus more on safety, and feeling the weight of so many dead on his shoulders, Valerii Legasov hanged himself on the disaster’s second anniversary - a day after his proposal for a reformed Soviet scientific community was rejected. During the hours preceding his death, he dictated his memoirs in the form of a lengthy voice recording, in which he concluded that the accident was the, “apotheosis of all that was wrong in the management of the national economy and had been so for many decades.”259

The RBMK’s stunning dual lack of the most crucial containment barriers is a glaring omission that should never have been considered, let alone designed, approved and built. Select Soviet Ministers were made aware of these inadequacies before the reactors were chosen, but still the RBMK design was selected over the competing ‘Vodo-Vodyanoi Energetichesky Reaktor’ (VVER, or ‘Water-Water Power Reactor’), a pressurised water reactor which was safer, but more expensive and marginally less powerful. Conventional wisdom at the time was that the RBMK could never cause a large-scale accident, because industry safety regulations would always be adhered to. Extra safety measures, they decided, were unnecessary.

The Army’s Office of Special Weapons Developments had addressed the first question in a 1955 report, “Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation of Atomic Weapons.” It looked at the frequency of natural disasters in the United States during the previous fifty years, quantified their harmful effects according to property damage and loss of life—and then argued that accidental nuclear explosions should be permitted on American soil at the same rate as similarly devastating earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes. According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 125.

In an improvised courtroom, the deserted town of Chernobyl’s own Palace of Culture played host to the last of the USSR’s show-trials. Soviet law required that the trial take place near the scene of the crime, and radiation provided a convenient excuse to limit the number of attendees, since access to the zone required special papers. Ostensibly an open trial with journalists and victims’ families invited to the opening and closing days, the bulk of the three-week proceedings took place in secret, behind closed doors. Charges brought against the defendants went back to the earliest days of the plant, when the test was supposed to have been conducted during commissioning, but also spanned routine disregard of safety regulations and failure to provide proper on-site training.

The explosion tore away water pipes used to supply coolant into the bottom of the core, preventing the reactor from being fed with water by the mangled pumps. Unfortunately, the operators did not realise this - or were in denial, given the horrifying consequences a reactor explosion would entail - and their lack of understanding lead them down the wrong course of action which served only to exacerbate the situation and throw lives away. Instead, Deputy-Chief Engineer Dyatlov became convinced the explosions had been caused by hydrogen in the Safety Control System’s emergency water tank, and that the reactor must still be intact. Even though he had no real basis for this explanation - and if he had looked out of a window he would have seen that he was wrong - he acted on this belief for hours after.

Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium. 
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible. 
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines. 
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.

Regardless, at 01:23:40 on April 26th, 1986, 32-year-old Alexander Akimov made his fateful decision and announced that he was pressing the EPS-5 emergency safety button to initiate a SCRAM, causing all remaining control rods to begin their slow descent into the core.116 It117 was a decision that would change the course of history. An emergency shutdown was Akimov’s obvious choice. A large part of the reason why the core was so unstable was that almost all 211 rods had been removed, after all, leaving him and his colleagues with very little control over the reactor. He may even - if the stories of Toptunov shouting to him are true - have considered this to be his only choice, given how many safety systems had been disabled. Alas, it was, in fact, the worst thing he could have done. Within seconds, the control rods stopped moving.

There’s one major shortcoming inherent to using this method of cooling. Unlike in a typical PWR, the water entering the reactor is the same water that passes through the cooling pumps and then as steam through the turbines, meaning highly irradiated water is present in all areas of the system. A PWR uses a heat exchanger to pass heat from the reactor water to clean, lower pressure water, allowing the turbines to remain free of contamination. This is better for safety, maintenance and disposal. A second problem is that steam is allowed to form in the core, making dangerous steam voids more likely, and further increasing the chances of a positive void coefficient. In ordinary boiling water reactors, which use water as both a coolant and moderator like in a PWR, this would not be such a problem, but it is in a graphite-moderated BWR.

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together - that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course that were on, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason that so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident that they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers. It’s not just that they need to believe that there is an escape hatch from the world they are creating, its that the rapture is a parable for what they are building down here – a system that invites destruction and disaster then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.

At 01:23:04, turbine 8 was disconnected and began to coast down.114 The operators still had no idea what was about to happen and began a calm discussion, remarking that the reactor’s task was complete and they could start to shut it down.115 Exactly what happened next is not 100% clear. Dyatlov claimed afterwards that the test proceeded as normal with no problems and that Akimov pressed the EPS-5 emergency safety button simply to shut down the reactor at the test’s conclusion as planned. Others said there were shouts and that Akimov pressed it after Toptunov saw readings on his control board that indicated a serious problem. Though reactivity increased slightly as the turbine speed dropped, some reports and simulations have concluded that no strange phenomena occurred prior to pressing the button and that all readings, under the circumstances, were normal.

A meltdown is when the core components (fuel, cladding, control rods etc.) of a reactor get so hot that they melt together and become a kind of radioactive magma. This can burn down through a containment vessel and potentially through the concrete foundations of the reactor building. If the molten core were to breach all containment and burn down to the water table in the earth below, there was a chance of triggering a colossal steam explosion, with results much the same as an explosion in the pressure suppression pool. Interestingly, modern Russian reactors have a safety feature designed specifically to deal with this eventuality: a solid pool of metallic alloy lying beneath the reactor. If a melting core breaches its containment vessel, the pool catches it and liquefies, creating currents that swirl the molten core against water-cooled steel walls to prevent it from burning through the foundations.

Here was an entry - a serious one - which he hadn't crossed out in years. He couldn't remember where it came from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: 'In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.' Yes, that deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of 'happy or unhappy'. But the key was: 'Once you give yourself over to it entirely.' Despite appearances, this wasn't pessimistic, nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to enclose all of life's sadness. He remembered again the friend who, long ago, had told him that the secret of marriage was 'to dip in and out of it'. Yes, he could see that this might keep you safe. But safety had nothing to do with love.

How does our self-sufficiency ruin safety? Primarily by preventing us from experiencing our impoverishment. People who “have it together” are not hungry, or thirsty, for others. They do not feel a lack within when they’re alone or in distress. They do not connect with other people, because they do not experience any need for it. Adults who grow up in military families often report this dynamic. They’ll move twelve times in as many years, and they quickly realize that they probably won’t see their classmates ever again after each school year. To survive, they simply construct an adaptive front that lets them make a few acquaintances and not get rejected by the class, and that’s it. No one gets inside, no one gets close. They stay self-sufficient to keep from experiencing overwhelming loss and abandonment. And they often hold it together until they grow up and try to pull off a marriage—at which time disaster erupts.

Preventing a radioactive release is the highest priority at any nuclear facility, so power stations are built and operated with a safety philosophy of ‘defense in depth’. Defense in depth aims to avoid accidents by embracing a safety culture, but also accepts that mechanical (and human) failures are inevitable. Any possible problem - however unlucky - is then anticipated and factored into the design with multiple redundancies. The goal, therefore, is to provide depth to the safety systems; akin to the way Russian dolls have several layers before reaching the core doll. When one element fails, there is another, and another, and another that still functions. The first barrier are the fuel ceramic pellets themselves, followed by each fuel rod’s zirconium alloy cladding. In an ordinary modern commercial nuclear plant, the nuclear core where the fission reaction takes place would be contained inside a third barrier: an almost unbreakable metal shield enveloping the reactor, called a ‘pressure vessel’.

In 1957 the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project offered a new set of acceptable probabilities. For example, it proposed that the odds of a hydrogen bomb exploding accidentally—from all causes, while in storage, during the entire life of the weapon—should be one in ten million. And the lifespan of a typical weapon was assumed to be ten years. At first glance, those odds made the possibility of a nuclear disaster seem remote. But if the United States kept ten thousand hydrogen bombs in storage for ten years, the odds of an accidental detonation became much higher—one in a thousand. And if those weapons were removed from storage and loaded onto airplanes, the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five. And during that same period, the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident in the United States would be about 100 percent.

So what really happened, and what became of them? The basement entry, while dangerous, wasn’t quite as dramatic as modern myth would have you believe. The pressure suppression pool drainage valves couldn’t be reached because most watertight basement corridors and surrounding rooms were full of water. The solution required a team of highly trained firemen wearing respirators and rubber suits to charge their fire engines and the Chemical Troops’ protective armoured vehicles into a loading bay beneath the reactor. There, they placed four special, ultra-long hoses into the water before retreating to the safety of Bryukhanov’s bunker beneath the administration building. After three hours of almost zero water movement, the dejected firemen came to the crushing realisation that one of the armoured vehicles must have driven over and severed their hoses. A fresh team brought twenty new hoses and re-entered the reactor building. They emerged an hour later, feeling exhausted and nauseous but triumphant; the replacement hoses were in place, the remaining radioactive water could finally be drained.201

The test would involve inserting all 211 control rods part-way, creating a power level low enough to resemble a blackout while continuing to cool the reactor to compensate for fission products. Use the residual steam in the system to drive a turbine, then isolate it and allow it to run down, generating electricity through its own inertia. The electrical output would be measured, allowing engineers to determine whether it was sufficient to power the water pumps in an emergency. Because the deliberately low power levels would appear to be a power failure to the control computer, which would then automatically activate the safety systems, these systems, including the backup diesel generators and Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS), were disconnected in order to re-attempt the test straight away if it proved unsuccessful. Otherwise, the ECCS would automatically shutdown the reactor, preventing a repeat of the test for another year. Astonishingly, these measures were not in violation of safety procedures when approved by a Deputy Chief Engineer, despite many subsequent reports to the contrary.96

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

After the report’s release, opinions within the scientific community shifted. New information exonerated plant staff of much of the blame; proved that they had not violated operating procedures as much as was previously claimed; that key areas of the reactor’s documentation were inadequate; and that defective reactor design had played a significant role in causing the disaster. In 1992, the IAEA’s International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group revised their original report to include the new information and published it as ‘INSAG-7’. This new report made it clear the accident would never have occurred had there been a proper culture of safety, feedback and oversight in the USSR’s nuclear industry. Even though the official story remained that the operators were partially responsible, INSAG-7 reiterates the fundamental point that, “Nuclear plant designs must be, as far as possible, invulnerable to operator error, and to deliberate violation of safety procedure.”263 In total, the International Atomic Energy Agency identified 45 safety issues in their review of the Chernobyl power station after the accident: 19 of high severity; 24 medium; 2 low.

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

Wisdom’s Rebuke 20Out in the open wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; 21on top of the walld she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech: 22“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? 23Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings. 24But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand, 25since you disregard all my advice and do not accept my rebuke, 26I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you— 27when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. 28“Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, 29since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the LORD. 30Since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, 31they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. 32For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; 33but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.

Wisdom’s Rebuke 20Out in the open wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; 21on top of the wall[4] she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech: 22“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? 23Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings. 24But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand, 25since you disregard all my advice and do not accept my rebuke, 26I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you— 27when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. 28“Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, 29since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the LORD. 30Since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, 31they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. 32For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; 33but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.

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— PAULING’S ADVOCACY GAVE BIRTH TO a vitamin and supplement industry built on sand. Evidence for this can be found by walking into a GNC center—a wonderland of false hope. Rows and rows of megavitamins and dietary supplements promise healthier hearts, smaller prostates, lower cholesterol, improved memory, instant weight loss, lower stress, thicker hair, and better skin. All in a bottle. No one seems to be paying attention to the fact that vitamins and supplements are an unregulated industry. As a consequence, companies aren’t required to support their claims of safety or effectiveness. Worse, the ingredients listed on the label might not reflect what’s in the bottle. And we seem to be perfectly willing to ignore the fact that every week at least one of these supplements is pulled off the shelves after it was found to cause harm. Like the L-tryptophan disaster, an amino acid sold over the counter and found to cause a disease that affected 5,000 people and killed 28. Or the OxyElite Pro disaster, a weight-loss product that caused 50 people to suffer severe liver disease; one person died and three others needed lifesaving liver transplants. Or the Purity First disaster, a Connecticut company’s vitamin preparations that were found to contain two powerful anabolic steroids, causing masculinizing symptoms in dozens of women in the Northeast.

By 01:00, after around half an hour, the pair had succeeded in increasing the power to 200MWt by retracting about half of the control rods, but that was as high as it would go - nowhere near the intended 700MWt. Xenon poisoning had already taken its toll, seriously reducing the fuel’s reactivity. Russian safety regulations have since changed to require that an RBMK reactor be kept at a minimum of 700MWt during normal operation because of thermal-hydraulic instability at reduced power. Knowing 200MWt was still far too low to perform the test, they overrode additional automatic systems and manually raised still more control rods to compensate for the poisoning effect.108 At the same time, they connected all 8 main circulating pumps and increased the flow of coolant into the core, up to around 60,000 tons per hour.109 This volume of water was another violation of safety regulations, since very high water flow could lead to cavitation in the pipes. Increased coolant levels meant less steam, which soon caused the turbine speeds to drop. To counteract negative reactivity from all the extra coolant water, the operators withdrew most of the few control rods still inside the reactor, until the equivalent of only 8 fully inserted rods remained.110 The normal absolute minimum allowed at the time was 15, which increased to 30 after the accident.111

Using graphite as a moderator can be highly dangerous, as it means that the nuclear reaction will continue - or even increase - in the absence of cooling water or the presence of steam pockets (called ‘voids’). This is known as a positive void coefficient and its presence in a reactor is indicative of very poor design. Graphite moderated reactors were used in the USA in the 1950s for research and plutonium production, but the Americans soon realised their safety disadvantages. Almost all western nuclear plants now use either Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs) or Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), which both use water as a moderator and coolant. In these designs, the water that is pumped into the reactor as coolant is the same water that is enabling the chain reaction as a moderator. Thus, if the water supply is stopped, fission will cease because the chain reaction cannot be sustained; a much safer design. Few commercial reactor designs still use a graphite moderator. Other than the RBMK and its derivative, the EGP-6, Britain’s Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) design is the only other graphite-moderated reactor in current use. The AGR will soon be joined by a new type of experimental reactor at China’s Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant, which is currently under construction. The plant will house two graphite-moderated ‘High Temperature Reactor-Pebble-bed Modules’ reactors, the first of which is undergoing commissioning tests as of mid-2019.

But it was still to the liberty of submission, the most difficult of all, that I applied myself most strenuously. I determined to make the best of whatever situation I was in; during my years of dependence my subjection lost its portion of bitterness, and even ignominy, if I learned to accept it as a useful exercise. Whatever I had I chose to have, obliging myself only to possess it totally, and to taste the experience to the full. Thus the most dreary tasks were accomplished with ease as long as I was willing to give myself to them. Whenever an object repelled me, I made it a subject of study, ingeniously compelling myself to extract from it a motive for enjoyment. If faced with something unforeseen or near cause for despair, like an ambush or a storm at sea, after all measures for the safety of others had been taken, I strove to welcome this hazard, to rejoice in whatever it brought me of the new and unexpected, and thus without shock the ambush or the tempest was incorporated into my plans, or my thoughts. Even in the throes of my worst disaster, I have seen a moment when sheer exhaustion reduced some part of the horror of the experience, and when I made the defeat a thing of my own in being willing to accept it. If ever I am to undergo torture (and illness will doubtless see to that) I cannot be sure of maintaining the impassiveness of a Thrasea, but I shall at least have the resource of resigning myself to my cries. And it is in such a way, with a mixture of reserve and of daring, of submission and revolt carefully concerted, of extreme demand and prudent concession, that I have finally learned to accept myself.

At that moment, remarkably, there was a man in the expansive reactor hall of Unit 4 who witnessed all this.121 Night Shift Chief of the Reactor Shop Valeriy Perevozchenko saw the top of the reactor - a 15-meter-wide disk comprised of 2000 individual metal covers which cap safety valves - begin to jump up and down. He ran. The reactor’s uranium fuel was increasing power exponentially, reaching some 3,000°C, while pressure rose at a rate of 15 atmospheres per second. At precisely 01:23:58, a mere 18 seconds after Akimov pressed the SCRAM button, steam pressure overwhelmed Chernobyl’s incapacitated fourth reactor. A steam explosion blew the 450-ton, 3-meter-thick upper biological shield clear off the reactor before it crashed back down, coming to rest at a steep angle in the raging maw it left behind. The core was exposed.122 A split second later, steam and inrushing air reacted with the fuel’s ruined zirconium cladding to create a volatile mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, which triggered a second, far more powerful explosion.123 Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor—not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster. These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them. “The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.

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No, this is what has suddenly consumed me: if something were to happen on the island of Manhattan, the fact that we are, indeed, on an island would suddenly become a deep and terrible problem. I am wholly unequipped for a disaster. Vulnerable. The safety in numbers I had always felt in the city was an illusion. All those numbers could turn against each other under the right circumstances.

In the course of a lifetime a series of uncomfortable adventures that shape your character and give you stories to look back and laugh about isn't a disaster. A disaster is a series of unmemorable weeks, months, or years that leave you unchanged.

But, as we increase our understanding of the complex socio-technical systems and interactions that enable safe outcomes (or do not), new views of safety (table 3) are emerging that see human error not as the cause of an accident, but as symptomatic of deeper issues.

The conceptual auto-disaster. The volunteer panels were shown fake safety propaganda movies in which implausible accidents were staged. Far from eliciting a humorous or sardonic response from the audience, marked feelings of hostility were shown towards the film and medical support staff. Subsequent films of genuine accidents exerted a notably calming effect. From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture - telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines - computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons - where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice.

Given the controversy then raging over the safety of gasoline stoves and the sheer number of fatalities attributed to their use, Frances’s death was ruled accidental: her official death certificate reads “burn from gasoline stove.”33 Only later, when the world learned exactly what Andrew Kehoe was capable of, did rumors spread that his stepmother’s awful death had a very different cause: while Frances was out gathering nuts with her daughter, Andrew—knowing that she would begin cooking as soon as she returned—had rigged the stove to explode.

Society also tolerates very little risk in the energy business, understandably so. We demand reliable electricity; the lights had better come on every time a customer flips a switch. We also worry about disasters. In fact, safety concerns have nearly killed off new construction of nuclear plants in the United States. Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.

The fragility and remorselessness of this life demanded a certain level of discipline. If a single slip could produce disaster, with little in the way of a social safety net to cushion the fall; if death, or drought, or disease, or betrayal could come crushingly at any moment; then character and discipline were paramount requirements. This was the shape of life: an underlying condition of peril, covered by an ethos of self-restraint, reticence, temperance, and self-wariness, all designed to minimize the risks. People in that culture developed a moral abhorrence of anything that might make life even more perilous, like debt or childbirth out of wedlock. They developed a stern interest in those activities that might harden resilience.

What went wrong? Lasko and his team spent ages thinking about risk, but they never shifted their perspective from thinking of the Great Chicago Fire Festival as a unique project to seeing it as “one of those”; that is, part of a wider class of projects. If they had, they would have spent time thinking about live events. How do they fail? One common way is equipment failure. Mics don’t work. Computers crash. How is that risk mitigated? Simple: Identify essential equipment, get backups, and make contingency plans. That kind of analysis is dead easy—but only after you have shifted to the outside view. Notice that risk mitigation does not require predicting the exact circumstances that lead to disaster. Jim Lasko didn’t need to identify when and how the ignition system would fail, only recognize that it could. And have a Plan B if it did. Recall what Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1758: “A little neglect may breed great mischief.” This is why high safety standards are an excellent form of risk mitigation and a must on all projects. They’re not just good for workers; they prevent little things from combining in unpredictable ways into project-smashing black swans.

The tornado the alarms had screamed about ... hadn't actually happened, but around here you never know. Better safe in the cellar than sorry halfway up the sky.

Air New Zealand Flight 901

Would you be comfortable travelling in a car or an air plane or maybe in a space shuttle in the future, knowing that the only safety mechanism that the engineers relied upon was positive thinking and visualization of everything being perfect? Would you feel safe knowing that engineers did not imagine and solve most of the possible negative outcomes that could happen that dramatically increase the chances of an accident? Would you want to live in a building built by someone who only relied on positive thinking and did not thinking of how to safeguard it from possible disasters? The buildings we live in, the things we travel in and the devices we use are relatively safe today BECAUSE of the positive steps taken as a result of negative and cautious thinking. Confidence is a great thing but sometimes the lack of it is an even better thing. The fear motivates you to settle for nothing less than excellence.

As even the Pentagon, a cautious bastion of technological nonpartisanship, concluded, “the danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe.” An official U.S. National Security Strategy report declared the situation a growing national security threat, arguing, “The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe.” The report unambiguously predicted that if nothing were done, “climate change and pandemic disease” would directly threaten “the health and safety of the American people.

I don't have a lot of freedom, from the guys or my role, but when I ride my bike, I'm on the verge between control and the bike controlling me. My life wavers between safety and danger, but this time the split second between triumph and disaster is in my hands. And I need more.

The night was still and cool, with no hint of stars above the cloud cover. The forecasted rain had yet to fall, and he was beginning to believe that they were going to get through the cattle drive without some kind of disaster. Even as the thought formed, he made a fist and knocked on the log. No point in tempting fate. Not when there were still two days and plenty of miles between his greenhorns and the safety of the house.

The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age. The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.

Never sacrifice in the quality of ground transportation and safety for just the investment alone. That's a disaster waiting to happen. Thank

The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the police and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

Rahul Sagar, a professor at Princeton, has defined these well in his new book Secrets and Leaks:73 First, a whistleblower must have clear and convincing evidence of abuse. Second, releasing the information must not pose a disproportionate threat to public safety. Third, the information leaked must be as limited in scope and scale as possible. Snowden failed all three of these criteria. He has not shown systematic abuse, only secrecy and mistakes. He has harmed and weakened his country and its allies (indeed, for some Snowdenistas, this is a stated aim). He has stolen far more information than was necessary to make the case he purports to want to make. Why?

Earlier in the day, Coast Guard helicopters had arrived and volunteered to spend an hour transporting healthy people to safety (they didn’t have enough space for seriously ill patients on stretchers). “Part of the disaster was natural, but a big, big part of it was man-made and poor decision making,

the last decade can be regarded as “the lost decade” because no improvements in flight safety matters have been made in that period.

each and all of our lives are put at increasing risk daily when we fly and for one reason only. The aggressive pursuit of profit—and the erosion of safety standards caused by that same relentless pursuit.

Each and every airline is left to decide what is best for our children’s safety, and the result should leave the public in no doubt that safety is not the main priority of many airlines. If it was, every child would have a safe and secure seat.

FEBRUARY 20 I WILL BE YOUR DEFENSE AND REFUGE I HAVE GIVEN you refuge in the shadow of My wings, and I will keep you in safety until the disaster has passed. My glory will be a canopy of protection for you. It will be a shelter and shade from the heat of the day, and a refuge and hiding place from the storm and rain. I am your shelter from the wind and your refuge in the storm. I will be like streams of water in the desert and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. I have put My words in your mouth and covered you with the shadow of My hand. Gladness and joy will overtake you, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. I am He who comforts you. PSALM 91; ISAIAH 4:6; 32:1–2; 51:11–16 Prayer Declaration I will trust in the covering of Your wings, and in the shadow of Your wings I will trust. Be my defense and refuge in times of trouble. I will sing of Your strength. In the morning I will sing of Your love, for You are my fortress. You are my strength. I sing praise to You, for on You I can rely.

I am aware, from my earliest recollections, that we lived with the feeling that the life of the individual or of the entire Jewish community was always in danger. Being born Jewish implied a way of life, a set of beliefs and traditions and a feeling of belonging to a community, a group, that faced the same uncertainties, was potentially the victim of persecution from any possible group or from the government, depending on political or social circumstances. When financial difficulties arose in the country, international crises, war, unemployment, a failed harvest - in short - any natural or social or political disasters that occurred, were often turned into antisemitic outbursts. That was the safety valve, they let off steam and we took the heat, bore the brunt of their anger.

Bandages and Supplies 50 assorted-size adhesive bandages 1 large trauma dressing 20 sterile dressings, 4x4 inch 20 sterile dressings, 3x3 inch 20 sterile dressings, 2x2 inch 1 roll of waterproof adhesive tape (10 yards x 1 inch) 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 1/2 inch 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 1 inch 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 2 inch » 1 elastic bandage, 3 inch » 1 elastic bandage, 4 inch » 2 triangular cloth bandages » 10 butterfly bandages » 2 eye pads Medications 2 to 4 blood-clotting agents 10 antibiotic ointment packets (approximately 1 gram) 1 tube of hydrocortisone ointment 1 tube of antibiotic ointment 1 tube of burn cream 1 bottle of eye wash 1 bottle of antacid 1 bottle syrup of ipecac (for poisoning) 1 bottle of activated charcoal (for poisoning) 25 antiseptic wipe packets 2 bottles of aspirin or other pain reliever (100 count) 2 to 4 large instant cold compresses 2 to 4 small instant cold packs 1 tube of instant glucose (for diabetics) Equipment 10 pairs of large latex or nonlatex gloves 1 space blanket or rescue blanket 1 pair of chemical goggles 10 N95 dust/mist respirators or medical masks 1 oral thermometer (nonmercury/nonglass) 1 pair of splinter forceps 1 pair of medical scissors 1 magnifying glass 2 large SAM Splints (optional) 1 tourniquet Assorted safety pins Optional Items If Trained to Use 1 CPR mask 1 bag valve mask 1 adjustable cervical spine collar 1 blood pressure cuff and stethoscope or blood pressure device 1 set of disposable oral airways 1 oxygen tank with regulator and non-rebreather mask Suturing kit and sutures Surgical or super glue If you have advanced training, such items as a suturing kit, IV setup, and medical instruments may be added.

As he tumbled from the ship, he managed, through remarkable presence of mind, to seize hold of a rope. It was one of the topsail halyards that, good news for John, was trailing in the rolling seawater. Used to raise the upper sail, the trailing rope now provided the only chance of escaping catastrophe. It should have been carefully tied to a cleat, but it was not secured. And due to that piece of untidy seamanship, John Howland survived. In the desperate lunge that ended with him grabbing the twisted, slippery rope, he saved himself from drowning. He clung on even though he found himself, in Bradford’s words again, “sundry fathoms under water.” Back on the Mayflower there was a hurrying of men to the side of the pitching vessel. Many hands took up the shipward end of the rope and hauled him back towards safety. As the exhausted and drenched man was pulled from the waves and up against the rough timbers of the rolling Mayflower, someone grabbed a boat hook and, by catching it in his coat, helped pull him back on board.6 It had been a close call. Had the trailing rope not been there, had Howland failed to catch it, he would have been swept away by the white-crested waves and lost. As it was, he lived. It was an almost unbelievable event; an astonishing cheating of death. All of the godly who witnessed it or who heard of it would have felt convinced that it was possible only by the providential hand of God. Jonah-like, John Howland had been both thrown into the stormy deep and also rescued from it (though without the intervention of a great fish) by the will of God. His, clearly, was a life marked out for future importance in the story of the colony about to be founded. Heads would have nodded as word of the event spread among the godly passengers on the ship. Here, clearly, was a man in the hand of God. A man blessed and marked out by the action of the Almighty. The crew, though, probably winked and swore as they considered the naivete of a landsman taking the air in such a storm. For them it was just the latest evidence that these passengers were doomed to disaster; they lacked the edge and awareness needed to survive what lay ahead of them. And those less godly among the passengers might also have been less willing than some of those around them to assume the certainty of providence acting in the events. Which of these would be proved right—faithful Saints, profane seamen, uncertain Strangers—only time would tell. But one thing was certain: the name of John Howland was on everyone’s lips. And he himself was being written into history.

The world of paranoid distrust did not arise out of a vacuum. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Challenger disaster, the AIDS crisis—again and again science and government have revealed not only their failure to deliver on basic health and safety, but their steadfast refusal to take ownership. Until they do, conspiracies about government cover-ups will continue, and distrust of the scientific establishment will be widespread and often warranted.

Being rescued by two strong men has stirred something elemental inside me. Some unevolved corner of my womanhood thrills at being dragged to safety. It wants to repay these men in the oldest known currency.

The government engaging in a blatant cover-up of police corruption is a public safety disaster that will take decades to fix.

Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kyiv’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.