Catastrophe in an Age of Enlightenment

The greatest European calamity of the eighteenth century, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake is often called the “first modern disaster” in part because of the vigorously rational inquiry into its causes, which informed a self-consciously scientific post-disaster rebuilding effort. Examining responses to the Lisbon earthquake (and to the seemingly related Cape Ann earthquake, which occurred in Massachusetts three weeks later), this chapter interprets these episodes as a cultural event that drew on both Enlightenment rationalism and ideals of sensibility to forge a modern culture of disaster in embryonic form. This chapter focuses on three key developments: the interplay between religious and scientific explanations for the earthquake, even among some clergy; its unusually rich popular culture, which included unprecedented numbers of visual representations and Voltaire’s Candide, along with widely circulated eyewitness accounts by merchants and sea captains; and the remarkable international relief effort to aid earthquake victims, which included significant and widely publicized contributions from King George II and the British Parliament.

A Moral Revolution at Mazorra, 1899–1902

Chapter 1 examines the massive reconstruction effort undertaken at Mazorra at the end of the Cuban independence war. In particular, it examines the collaboration between U.S. occupying forces and Cuban liberating hero Lucas Álvarez Cerice to transform popular outrage over asylum conditions into a popular and patriotic rebuilding effort. Both groups turned Mazorra into a key nationalist icon, even as their efforts to implement a new therapeutic regimen (with particular emphasis on work as treatment) recapitulated racial and class divides.

International Real Estate Review

This paper uses hedonic regression to examine prices in the Christchurch housing market before, and after, the recent severe earthquakes. Prices were relatively stable prior to the earthquakes but increased rapidly thereafter, consistent with the contraction of supply and increased demand from displaced households and a net influx of workers involved in the rebuilding effort. In addition, we find that the use of auctions increased after the earthquakes and that auctioned properties command significantly higher prices as compared to other sales methods, helping to explain the increased interest in this form of price discovery. Results are robust after correcting for potential sample selection bias.

Inundated by the Audience: Journalism, Audience Participation and the 2011 Brisbane Flood

Following the Brisbane flood in 2011, Seven's breakfast television program Sunrise launched a partnership with the Queensland government called ‘Operation Bounce Back’. The initiative called on skilled tradespeople to volunteer for the rebuilding effort, and extended Sunrise's representations of audience participation. In this article, we examine Operation Bounce Back in relation to different accounts of audience participation. We look at the interaction between Sunrise and the government in the management of Operation Bounce Back, and draw on both Sunrise's representations of the program and documents obtained under Right to Information provisions. The case provides the basis for considering the role of journalism in managing representations of public and audience participation.

Cleaning up New Orleans: The impact of a missing population on disaster debris removal

Public participation in a disaster debris removal process is an important component to any large-scale rebuilding effort. How, then, does such an effort progress when nearly two-thirds of the affected community’s population does not come back to participate? The City of New Orleans faced just such a situation after Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic flooding that followed. The debris removal task is the largest in US history, and very few residents returned to participate in the cleanup. This article provides a further understanding of the impact that New Orleans’ missing population had on the city’s cleanup process. This article asserts that without this city’s residents (or first filters), the enormous debris removal effort in New Orleans was further slowed and complicated. The first two sections provide background and context, identifying the size and scope of the disaster, the low residential return rate, and the role of public participation in previous large-scale debris removal efforts. The next three sections focus on the disaster debris itself, identifying specific ways in which the missing population further complicated New Orleans’ cleanup efforts with regard to (a) the duration of the debris removal process, (b) the volume of debris, and (c) the contamination of debris.The final section considers various measures that emergency planners and managers can take to facilitate “participatory repopulation,” thus mitigating the complications of a missing population.

Economic aspects of peacekeeping in Iraq: What went wrong?

Prospects for Iraq's economy are bleak: unemployment remains high and the post-war rebuilding effort has slowed to a trickle, weighed down by chronic instability. Rising oil prices increased GDP in 2004 and 2005. But an oil-induced rise in GDP will not necessarily bring about a general rise in incomes, as the oil sector employs only 1 percent of the labor force. To raise general living standards, oil income needs to be converted into increased employment and output in sectors with high social rates of return. This article reviews key Coalition Provisional Authority post-war policies and their effects, and proposes and discusses a set of alternative policies that would be better suited to improve Iraqi living standards and help secure peace.

Earthquakes and Ancient Cities: Armageddon—Not the End of the World

The reduction of an entire city to a pile of rubble poses a special problem for the survivors. Roads are blocked, underground pipes are broken, and disease accompanies the decay of incompletely buried bodies. Fresh water and sewage no longer flow, food becomes scarce, and the absence of shelter from extremes of temperature can make life miserable. In the cities of the ancient world a very real practical problem followed in the months and years after the destruction of a city—a cleanup operation beyond the wildest dreams of the survivors. Although steam shovels had been used for moving heavy materials in building the Suez and Panama canals in 1869 and 1910, respectively, it was not until 1923 that the bulldozer was invented. The even more useful backhoe followed 25 years later. Thus, clearing debris was a daunting task as recently as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In his book The City That Is: The Story of the Rebuilding of San Francisco in Three Years, Rufus Steele wrote of the rebuilding effort: . . . First the ground had to be cleared. The task would have baffled Hercules— cleaning out the Augean stables was the trick of a child compared to clearing for the new city. This is a step in the rebuilding which fails entirely to impress the visitor of today. He can form no conception of the waste which had to be reduced to bits and then lifted and carted away to the dumping grounds. The cost of removing it was more than twenty million dollars. . . . Lacking what we would now consider modern machinery to move large volumes of debris, the rebuilders of San Francisco extended railway lines across town, brought in steam and electric cranes, and relied heavily on teams of horses that suddenly found themselves in enormous demand. According to Steele, “Huge mechanical devices for shoveling and loading were invented and set to work.” Formidable as the task may have been, San Francisco tapped into several critical resources in its Herculean efforts: trains, cranes, and, perhaps most important, large numbers of survivors following an earthquake that killed a very small fraction of the local population.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL A. VOLCKER

Paul A. Volcker has spent most of his life in public service, at the Treasury under President Kennedy (1962–1965) and then as Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs under President Nixon (1969–1974), as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1975–1979), and finally as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System under both President Carter and President Reagan (1979–1987). Born in 1927, his world view was formed by childhood experience of the Great Depression and World War II, times of great national trial that led ultimately to recommitment and reconstruction. He went into public service in order to be a part of the rebuilding effort, but it was his fate instead to be involved mainly in managing pressures that would ultimately lead to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system internationally and the Glass–Steagall banking system domestically. Consequently, there is some sadness today when he looks back on his career, but there is also a sense of accomplishment. In spite of everything, there was no depression and there was no world war. The possibility and hope for progress in years to come remains alive.The interview took place in Volcker's office at Rockefeller Center in New York City. His fourth-floor windows look out over the sunken plaza to the gold-leafed statue of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, and then on farther to the elegant GE building, which is familiar to anyone who has visited New York. Over the front entrance it is just possible to see the inscription adapted from Isaiah 33:6, “Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.” It strikes me as an appropriate inscription for the building, reminding one that this most beautiful complex was built in the years of the Great Depression. Today, with the forthcoming interview in mind, it reminds me also of the stakes involved in the conduct of monetary policy.