I’m “over West”, in one of my favourite parts of the world, for the Emergency Media and Public Affairs Conference. I was fortunate to have a day here before the conference, and be able to catch up with the team here in Perth, who have been dealing with the complexity of the tragic incident in […]
Read more "And this is what we want you to do"My colleague, collaborator and great friend, Shona Whitton left us a couple of weeks ago, having outgrown what we wanted from her at work. Like me, and Kate Brady, she’s very fascinated by how we make sense of disasters, from the first minutes to the years afterwards. One thing she has made a bit of […]
Read more "The right thing to do."I have been long fascinated with the London Underground. To say that I’m obsessed is a bit of an understatement. It surprised me that until recently, I didn’t know about the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster during World War two. I came upon it initially through the film Atonement, where Cecilia Tallis played by Keira Knightley […]
Read more "Bottom of the stairs"Gene Hackman is one of my favourite actors. Many of his movies are favourites, but two come to mind one wet weekend late last year, The Conversation, and Enemy of the State. In both Hackman plays paranoid surveillance type characters, obsessed with privacy. Both are thrillers, where Hackman is at odds with the powers that […]
Read more "What would Gene Hackman do?"It’s not often you get to enjoy the company of one of the world’s great minds in the area of Post Traumatic Stress. Yesterday I, and many of my colleagues, were able to revel in 3hours of post traumatic stress heaven (if there is such a thing), with Dr Patricia Watson, one of the gurus […]
Read more "Connecting"Value. How do we place it on what’s at risk. Implicitly we think we know, because our default position with what’s at risk in disasters is life, and property. But we know from dealing with the consequences that it is way more complex than that. A recent workshop I attended through the Bushfire and Natural […]
Read more "Diamonds are…"
Sastrugi 