Seminars to gauge disaster response

massey-university

Thu Mar 12 2009 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)

Seminars to gauge disaster response

Thursday, 12 March 2009, 3:27 pm
Press Release: Massey University

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Media Advisory

Australia’s devastating bushfires in Victoria offer a timely insight into how communities cope in the face of disaster a Massey University scientist says ahead of a seminar advising how organisations can prepare for, respond to and recover from a natural, man-made or environmental disaster.

Respected scientists from Australia and the US will be joining New Zealand colleagues on the Wellington campus for the Emergency Management Summer Institute being held from March 16-20 to provide those involved in aspects of disaster management like planners, educators, engineers and insurance managers how best to respond when the unthinkable happens.

Hosted by the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, a venture between GNS Science and Massey, the programme features day-long courses on subjects such as developing effective all-hazard warning systems, evacuation planning and welfare and the range of emergency management planning processes available.

High profile disasters such as the North Island floods in 2004, the Boxing Day tsunami of that same year and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 will be examined.

Centre director David Johnston, pictured left, said the short course programme had different purposes including offering a reminder to New Zealand planners about the ever-present risk of disaster striking even though the country had now gone more than 70 years since a disaster caused large scale death and destruction.

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Associate Professor Johnston, who last month had been due to attend an Australian Disaster Conference, which was cancelled in the aftermath of the Victoria bushfires, said that inferno killed a similar number of people to that lost in New Zealand’s last big disaster the Napier earthquake of 1931.

“In the absence of a major New Zealand disaster we can learn a lot from Australia about how communities recover.”

“These courses will identify gaps in our knowledge and deepen our understanding of the complexity of future disasters.”

The Emergency Management Summer Institute is being hosted by the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, School of Psychology, at Massey University’s Wellington campus from March 16-20 in Building 5 room B 14, access from Tasman St.

ENDS

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