Disaster Podcast

In this episode, we invited Dan Zehner from NHERI back on the show to talk about the recent Dam breach in Ukraine. The resulting flooding has necessitated widespread rescue attempts, many of which took place in an active war zone. We talk about the integrity of Dams, the long term impacts of such an infrastructure failure, and environmental hazards that might be encountered.

Dr. Joe Holley has been deploying with FEMA as a member of a Federal USAR team from Tennessee for a long time. He recently counted up forty-three (43) USAR and other deployments to disasters in the United States and abroad. For the last ten years of that time, he's been part of the Disaster Podcast team reporting to the listeners from the field about his experiences.

We take a look back at nearly ten years here on the Disaster Podcast on this week's show. We are joined by Becky and Dan DePodwin who share their favorite episodes. Co-hosts Jamie Davis and Sam Bradley share some of their favorite guests and topics from over the years, too.

Kevin Reiter, also known as the Broken Nomad (thebrokennomad.com), rejoins us this week to talk about his journey as a digital nomad on the road. We discuss his new van set up for traveling and working. We also chat about his preparedness planning, weather awareness, and general safety during his travels.

We invited our favorite meteorologist couple back to the show to talk about severe weather and the emergency management of disasters associated with it. Becky and Dan DePodwin join us and talk about the recent spate of tornadoes and severe storms that tracked across the mid and deep south, extending into the mid-Atlantic region, too.

This episode starts off with a Covid clinical update and a look at the fading of emergency measures across the country. As resources and free services are rolled back, some of the most at-risk individuals for ongoing COVID exposure no longer have access to many of the resources that helped them avoid and manage the disease before.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and native of Waverly, Tennessee. That town is the setting of her nonfiction book, WALK THROUGH FIRE: The Train Disaster That Changed America.

Emergency Manager, Patrick Hardy, comes on the show tonight to talk about his new book about preparedness. Patrick is recognized as the nation’s top expert in disaster preparedness across multiple industries, is an active philanthropist for disaster preparedness programs, and is the author of Design Any Disaster: The Revolutionary Blueprint to Master Your Next Crisis or Emergency (BenBella Books; March 7).

What the disaster response community needs is a place to gather and share best practices, look at new technologies and techniques, and network with other responders and emergency managers. Enter the Natural Disasters Expo (naturaldisastersshow.com).

Dan Zehner from NHERI (Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure) joins us to talk about the initial structural engineering look at the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. As soon as the earthquake struck and the extent of the structural failures became evident, members of NHERI and their international colleagues started examining all available data to understand why the buildings failed.