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In recent years, severe and deadly wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires have resulted in an increased focus on this particular risk to humans and property, especially in Canada, USA, Australia, and countries in the Mediterranean area. Also, in areas…
Author(s): Torgrim Log, Vigdis Vandvik, Liv G. Velle, Maria-Monika Metallinou
Year Published:

Evacuation is the preferred method in the U.S. for preserving public safety in wildfire. However, alternatives such as staying and defending are used both in North America and Australia. Dangerous delays in the decision to evacuate are also common.…
Author(s): Hugh D. Walpole, Robyn S. Wilson, Sarah M. McCaffrey
Year Published:

Wildfire management agencies increasingly seek to understand what the public values and expects to be protected from wildfire and its management. Recent conceptual development demonstrates the utility of considering values at three levels of…
Author(s): Kathryn J. Williams, Rebecca M. Ford, Andrea Rawluk
Year Published:

Wildland firefighting in the United States is a complex and costly enterprise. While there are strong seasonal signatures for fire occurrence in specific regions of the United States, spatiotemporal occurrence of wildfire activity can have high…
Author(s): Crystal S. Stonesifer, David E. Calkin, Michael S. Hand
Year Published:

As climate change has contributed to longer fire seasons and populations living in fire-prone ecosystems increase, wildfires have begun to affect a growing number of people. As a result, interest in understanding the wildfire evacuation decision…
Author(s): Sarah M. McCaffrey, Robyn S. Wilson, Avishek Konar
Year Published:

Ongoing challenges to understanding how hazard exposure and disaster experiences influence perceived risk lead us to ask: Is seeing believing? We approach risk perception by attending to two components of overall risk perception: perceived…
Author(s): Patricia A. Champ, Hannah Brenkert-Smith
Year Published:

Research across a variety of risk domains finds that the risk perceptions of professionals and the public differ. Such risk perception gaps occur if professionals and the public understand individual risk factors differently or if they aggregate…
Author(s): James R. Meldrum, Patricia A. Champ, Hannah Brenkert-Smith, Travis Warziniack, Christopher M. Barth, Lilia C. Falk
Year Published:

A cornerstone of effective institutional learning and accountability is the development, tracking, and analysis of informative performance measures. In a previous issue of Fire Management Today ("A New Look at Risk Management," Winter 2011), a…
Author(s): David E. Calkin, John Phipps, Thomas P. Holmes, Jon D. Rieck, Matthew P. Thompson
Year Published:

Perrow, developer of normal accident theory, argues here that we must reduce the size of targets that are vulnerable to disasters because organizations, including political ones, cannot completely prevent all the risks associated with the potential…
Author(s): Charles Perrow
Year Published:

Thousands of firefighters across the United States have been influenced by the first edition of “Managing the Unexpected”. In this second edition, the authors continue their analysis of high reliability organizations (HRO’s), which are organizations…
Author(s): Karl E. Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe
Year Published:

Research reveals that human error contributes 60 to 80 percent of error in aviation accidents and disasters. Thus, despite innovations in technology and safety materials, individuals must be able to make speedy yet intelligent decisions and be able…
Author(s): Janice L. Krieger
Year Published:

The purpose of this project is to help identify and prioritize the elements of successful communication strategies so that agency personnel can adapt them to their own situation for meeting management objectives. Preferred outcomes include…
Author(s): Bruce A. Shindler
Year Published:

While technology has provided the means for achieving unprecedented control over land, air, and sea, it has also become increasingly complex. As a result of this complexity, disasters are difficult to predict, and they are even more difficult to…
Author(s): James R. Chiles
Year Published:

This comprehensive chapter documents, from a management perspective, the knowledge base on risk assessments and risk management. The previous chapter in the book is a companion article that provides the scientific foundation for the concepts and…
Author(s): D.A. Cleaves, R. W. Haynes
Year Published:

To understand and avoid future calamities, decision makers must have a more accurate way of understanding past calamities. Most of what we know about calamities comes from eye witness accounts that favor relief efforts and damage reports rather than…
Author(s): Barry A. Turner, Nick F. Pidgeon
Year Published:

Alder recognizes two decisions common to both the Mann Gulch and Storm King Mountain fires that influenced the behavior of firefighters during critical moments: 1) failing to question authority and 2) failing to obey authority. He argues that these…
Author(s): G. Stoney Alder
Year Published:

Turner argues that while the best way to avoid disasters is primarily “for managers to establish, to strengthen, and then to assert control,” management control only addresses part of the problem, and there are limitations that affect management in…
Author(s): Barry Turner
Year Published:

This early work of Lagadec’s, though it is nearly a decade and half old, continues to provide a helpful summary of guidelines mangers can use during a crisis. The book, targeted specifically for decision makers, is organized into three parts that…
Author(s): Patrick Lagadec
Year Published:

Drawing upon experience working for NASA during the Apollo Missions and his studies of organizational communication, Tompkins illustrates that taking a communication perspective can help with understanding organizational problems. This book takes a…
Author(s): Phillip K. Tompkins
Year Published:

Focusing on the 1974 Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 514 crash, Tompkins discusses the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigation of the crash and points to communication between the pilot and controllers and communication between…
Author(s): Phillip K. Tompkins
Year Published: