Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
The author uses a critical realist perspective to investigate relations between social constructions and the dynamics of nature.
Only in recent times have serious historical studies been published about floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storm tides, forest-fires, and other natural disasters and their effects on human life.
The Great Flood of 1962 was the most devastating natural disaster to strike Germany in the twentieth century. In Hamburg, over one hundred thousand people were trapped by the water, and 315 people died, despite massive rescue operations.
The North Sea flood of 1953 caused widespread damage and approximately 2,400 fatalities in the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium. As devastating as it was, the flood also triggered many changes in how the countries surrounding the North Sea manage their flood risk, including the development of improved warning systems and various protection schemes.
This illustrated history recounts how, for the past three hundred years, hurricanes have altered lives and landscapes along the Georgia-South Carolina seaboard.
Wolf Read, a 2009 graduate student in the Department of Forest Sciences at UBC, talks about his research on the complicated nature of windstorms in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.
In 1969, the Georgian resort of Pitsunda and its beach were severely damaged by a storm. This was largely due to an ongoing process of coastal erosion caused by anthropogenic influences.
Contextualizing Disaster presents “highly visible” disasters as well as “slow and hidden” disasters, and how different parties involved in recovery processes contextualize them.
