Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events.
This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…
risk assessment
egrossman | July 14, 2014What do these places have in common: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina; Mountain View, California, where Google headquarters are located; Endicott, NY – the birthplace of IBM; and 389 Superfund sites in at least 48 states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? All are contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a volatile organic compound classified as a carcinogen that’s been widely used as a solvent and degreaser in large-scale industrial processes, small commercial shops and in some products used by individual consumers. On June 25th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its…
cmonforton | November 21, 2013My public health colleague, Adam Finkel, ScD, MPP, received this month the 2013 Alumni Leadership award from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), as part of the school’s 100th birthday celebration. Finkel and I were co-workers in the mid-1990’s at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, where he was the Director of the Office of Health Standards. I learned more from him about risk analysis and risk assessment than in any semester–long course. Why? Because agency risk assessments are not academic exercises when they are used to inform regulatory decisions.
Finkel touched on…