|
From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:
From winter storms, to earthquakes, to terrorism -- when a disaster strikes a community, who fares better, a rural community or an urban one?
A new study at the University of Illinois attempts to understand the differences in how rural and urban citizens across the US respond to disaster.
Courtney Flint, a rural sociologist and assistant professor at the U of I, and her student, Joanne Rinaldi, interviewed 20 coordinators of Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) across Illinois to find out what they are doing, what disasters they are prepared for and what they do between disasters.
"What we've learned so far is that in rural communities there is a tradition of being more self-reliant," said Flint.
Flint said that people in farm communities say, "We're on our own.
Tornadoes, flooding, winter storms, and hazardous material accidents can strike a city as well as a farm.
But in urban communities they are faced with a heavier concentration of people and a social vulnerability -- neighbors don't talk to each other as much.
Flint and Rinaldi are discovering that in rural communities, the CERTs themselves plan as if they might be the first responders to a disaster, while in urban and suburban communities in Chicago, for example, the need for CERTs is different because those communities have extensive first responders in their police and fire departments.
Many of the CERT coordinators spoke about three broad categories of potential hazards: weather events, transportation accidents and hazardous materials, and terrorism.
"Before disaster strikes, CERTS can do a lot in a community to be proactive by building awareness, educating and training.
Read more from this post.
Posted on January 13, 2007 08:49 PM
|
