Disaster Podcast

Today on the show we have EMS physician Dr. Kasia Hampton back after her medical tour in Ukraine to assist doctors and facilities there. Dr. Hampton studied medical school in Belgium before moving to the U.S. for her medical training in emergency medicine and pediatric medicine. She worked in the U.S. Army for five years as a civil service physician before moving to St. Louis in June 2021, where she worked an EMS fellow with Washington University.

Dan Zehner from NHERI (Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure) comes back on the show to bring us the preliminary StEER data collected during and after Hurricane Ian. StEER (Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance) is a crowd-sourced network of public and private individuals who go into areas following disasters and track damage caused by the event to structures and infrastructure.

With Hurricane Ian setting up to have a major impact on the central Gulf Coast of Florida, the Disaster Podcast team got together to talk about potential impacts and preparedness efforts. We were lucky to get disaster and emergency management meteorologist, Melissa Sizemore to come on this episode to share her broad expertise in weather, disaster messaging, and public information.

In this episode of the Disaster Podcast we look at managing mental health patients in the disaster situation. Emergency situations by their very nature bring on additional stress that can overwhelm a person without mental health issues. When a person with an existing behavioral condition confronts a disaster situation, they can quickly become unable to manage their illness.

In this episode, we look at the potential risks of solar flares or coronal ejections on electrical infrastructure. Our disaster meteorologists Dan and Becky DePodwin join us to talk about space weather prediction and some of the unique challenges posed by this little-known aspect of the national weather infrastructure.

Dr. Joe Holley was deployed with Tennessee Task Force One USAR team as part of the Federal FEMA response teams helping state and local resources in search and rescue efforts in Kentucky. Now Dr. Joe comes on the show to discuss his experiences with this particular response and the aftermath for responders as they return home from the deployment.

Dr. Joe Holley has been deployed with Tennessee Task Force One USAR team as part of the Federal FEMA response teams helping state and local resources in search and rescue efforts in Kentucky for over a week and a half. He checks in with us from the field to give us an update on what his teams are seeing and how the deployment is progressing.

Static weather fronts are dumping double-digit inches of rain on parts of the South-Western and Mid-Western United States. Kentucky in particular has been severely affected with a major state disaster declaration in place and Federal FEMA response teams on the way to bolster state and local resources in search and rescue efforts as the rain continues to fall.

Dan Chapman joins us from the U.K. on this episode. He's an emergency management planner over there and comes on the show to discuss how they're handling the messaging around the recent heat emergency they dealt with.

This week on the show, we talk about recent weather impacts across the U.S. and the unique preparedness challenges they present. From record heat waves impacting already historic drought conditions in the Western U.S. to record floods and rainfall in parts of the Eastern U.S., all people are facing some sort of weather related challenge. Even parts of Europe are facing record setting heat waves.