Disaster Plan News

December 24, 2024

Top Headlines

Adoption of 'Hospital-at-Home' Programs Remains Concentrated Among Larger, Urban, Not-for-Profit and Academic Hospitals

Dec. 23, 2024 — Hospitals that have adopted the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) 'hospital-at-home' program, which serves as an alternative to admission to brick-and-mortar facilities, are concentrated in ...

Scientists Urged to Pull the Plug on 'Bathtub Modeling' of Flood Risk

Dec. 6, 2024 — Recent decades have seen a rapid surge in damages and disruptions caused by flooding. Experts call on scientists to more accurately model these risks and caution against overly dramatized reporting of future risks in the news ...

Climate-Driven Hazards Increases Risk for Millions of Coastal Residents, Study Finds

Nov. 21, 2024 — A new study estimates that a 1-meter sea level rise by 2100 would affect over 14 million people and $1 trillion worth of property along the Southeast Atlantic ...

How Flood Risk Affects Home Values

Nov. 19, 2024 — Houses for sale in a flood zone are around 10% cheaper than surrounding areas, according to new research. However, the reduced price tag is not worth the extra risk and can burden buyers with long-term insurance costs, according to new ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:28pm EST

Some of the World's Least Polluting Populations Are at Much Greater Risk of Flooding Fueled by Climate Change

Nov. 7, 2024 — A new study has exposed for the first time how inhabitants of the smallest countries globally, contributing least to climate change, already bear the ...

Coastal Flooding During Hurricanes Helene and Milton Tracked

Oct. 29, 2024 — A web-based application that gathers crowdsourced data to identify flooding and inform policy in coastal communities provided scientists with essential data from hurricanes Helene and Milton. The app ...

A 'Worrying Confluence' of Flood Risk, Social Vulnerability and Climate Change Denial

Oct. 23, 2024 — In certain parts of the United States, especially Appalachia, New England and the Northwest, the ability of residents to prepare for and respond to ...

Geography: Improving Our Understanding of Complex Crises

Oct. 23, 2024 — Researcher presents a new model for risk research which takes interactions into account and brings together various ...

When Hurricanes Hit, Online Chatter Drowns out Safety Messaging

Oct. 17, 2024 — Research shows, during four recent major hurricanes, important public safety messaging was drowned out by more trivial social content--including people tweeting about pets, sharing human-interest ...

One-Time Cooperation Decisions Unaffected by Increased Benefits to Society

Oct. 8, 2024 — Until now, it was considered certain that people are more likely to cooperate if the benefits from cooperation are higher. A recently published, large-scale study has now called this finding into ...

Hurricanes Linked to Higher Death Rates for 15 Years After Storms Pass

Oct. 2, 2024 — U.S. tropical cyclones, including hurricanes, indirectly cause thousands of deaths for nearly 15 years after a storm. Researchers estimate an average U.S. tropical cyclone indirectly causes 7,000 to ...

Where Flood Policy Helps Most -- And Where It Could Do More

Sep. 30, 2024 — A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program provides important flood insurance relief, researchers say. But due to its design, it's used more in communities with greater means to protect ...

Dams Built to Prevent Coastal Flooding Can Worsen It

Sep. 13, 2024 — The common practice of building dams to prevent flooding can actually contribute to more intense coastal flood events, according to a new study. By analyzing data and measurements from Charleston ...

Traditional Infrastructure Design Often Makes Extreme Flooding Events Worse

Sep. 4, 2024 — Much of the nation's stormwater infrastructure, designed decades to a century ago to prevent floods, can exacerbate flooding during the severe weather events that are increasing around the ...

Land-Use Policy Rethink Vital to Hit Net Zero

Nov. 14, 2024 — Changing how land-use subsidies are implemented would give UK taxpayers better value for money and improve chances of meeting environmental targets such as Net ...

How Prisons Fall Short in Protecting the Incarcerated from Climate Disasters

Nov. 8, 2024 — A new study paints a grim picture of how blistering heat, wildfire smoke and other extreme weather events impact Colorado's jail and prison ...

New Study Traces Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Global Movement and Evolution of Seasonal Flu

Nov. 7, 2024 — Increased capabilities for genomic surveillance have offered new insights into global viral evolution. Seasonal flu showed a 'remarkable' bounce back to pre-pandemic levels once ...

Growing Divide: Rural Men Are Living Shorter, Less Healthy Lives Than Their Urban Counterparts

Sep. 25, 2024 — With an aging population and fewer physicians available, the burden on rural communities is set to ...

Outbreak Detection Under-Resourced in Asia, Study Finds

Sep. 24, 2024 — A new study has revealed that despite the recent pandemic, outbreak detection efforts remain under-resourced in South and Southeast Asia, with only about half the countries reviewed having integrated ...

Nonfatal Opioid Overdoses in Youth Spiked During Pandemic

Sep. 19, 2024 — Drug overdose mortality has risen faster among adolescents than the general population in recent years, largely due to fentanyl, a potent opioid pain medication. A new study sheds light on trends in ...

H5 Influenza Vaccines: What Needs to Be Done to Reduce the Risk of a Pandemic

Sep. 4, 2024 — As the global threat of H5N1 influenza looms with outbreaks across species and continents including the U.S., three international vaccine and public health experts say it is time to fully resource ...

COVID-19 Vaccination Mandates Boosted Uptake Among Health Care Workers, Study Finds

Sep. 3, 2024 — A new study has found that state-level COVID-19 vaccination mandates successfully increased vaccine rates among health care workers, a finding that, while perhaps unsurprising, provides evidence of ...

Lackluster Prioritization of the Health Sector in Government Spending and Dwindling Donor Contributions Drive Slow Growth in Health Spending in Sub-Saharan Africa

Aug. 28, 2024 — Slow growth in health sector spending is projected in Sub-Saharan Africa as reported in a study. The decline is expected to continue to 2050, according to the authors, and is driven by tepid growth ...

Engineers Develop AI System for Real-Time Sensing of Flooded Roads

Aug. 28, 2024 — Roadway-related incidents are a leading cause of flood fatalities nationwide, but limited flood-reporting tools make it difficult to evaluate road conditions in real ...

Coastal Cities Must Adapt Faster to Climate Change

Aug. 27, 2024 — Coastal cities play a key role in the global economy and have important functions for society at large. At the same time, they are severely affected by the impact of climate change. That is why their ...

Urban Street Networks, Building Density Shape Severity of Floods

Aug. 19, 2024 — The design of streets and layout of buildings have an impact on a city's resilience in the face of increasingly severe floods brought on by climate change. Researchers look at buildings and ...

Dark Rituals: Understanding Society's Fascination With Death and Disaster

Aug. 14, 2024 — Understanding why the popularity of organized events steeped in themes of death, disaster and suffering, such as the well-known Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), Jack the Ripper Walking Tours and ...

Hydrometeorology and Location Affect Hospitalizations for Waterborne Infectious Diseases in the US

Aug. 14, 2024 — An analysis of 12 years of data collected from over 500 hospitals in 25 different states shows that weather, geographic location, and urban or rural location all appear to influence hospitalizations ...

Nighttime Light Data Shows Inequities in Restoring Power After Hurricane Michael

Aug. 14, 2024 — Using nighttime lightdata from NASA, remote sensing, official outage records and census information, a study reveals notable differences in power-restoration rates between urbanized and rural areas ...

Type 2 Diabetes Cases More Than Doubled Seven Decades After Exposure to Famine

Aug. 12, 2024 — Researchers used the setting of the human-made Ukrainian Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 to examine the relation between prenatal famine and adult Type 2 diabetes ...

An Overlooked Side-Effect of the Housing Crisis May Be Putting Californians at Increased Risk from Climate Disasters

Aug. 5, 2024 — Researchers are in the midst of conducting a first-of-its-kind study to better understand the drivers, demographics, and dynamics of development in the Wildland-Urban Interface, where close proximity ...

Towards Smart Cities: Predicting Soil Liquefaction Risk Using Artificial Intelligence

Aug. 1, 2024 — Soil liquefaction that results in infrastructure damage has long been a point of contention for urban planners and engineers. Accurately predicting the soil liquefaction risk of a region could help ...

Barriers Designed to Prevent Saltwater Intrusion May Worsen Inland Flooding

July 31, 2024 — Building protection barriers without accounting for potential inland flooding risks from groundwater can eventually worsen the very issues they aim to ...

Nationwide Flood Models Poorly Capture Risks to Households and Properties, Study Finds

July 24, 2024 — Government agencies, insurance companies and disaster planners rely on national flood risk models from the private sector that aren't reliable at smaller levels such as neighborhoods and ...