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Featured Publication

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why
by Amanda Ripley

Crown Publishers, 2008
ISBN: 978-0307352897

Today, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? Will we be heroes or victims?

Amanda Ripley, an award-winning journalist for Time magazine, set out to discover what lies beyond fear and speculation. Ripley retraces the human response to some of history’s epic disasters, from the explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship in 1917–one of the biggest explosions before the invention of the atomic bomb–to a plane crash in England in 1985 to the journeys of the 15,000 people who found their way out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

To understand the science behind the stories, Ripley turns to leading brain scientists, trauma psychologists, and other disaster experts, formal and informal before making conclusions about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain’s fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses.

Natural Hazards Center Library

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Katrina Resource Page

The Center created a Web page that compiles a list of useful resources examining the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

The Natural Hazards Center Library at the University of Colorado houses one of the most unique collections of social science literature in the world. The library's primary focus is on research and information about how society prepares for, responds to, recovers from, and mitigates damage and other losses from natural hazards and catastrophic events.

This nonlending library is an important resource for scholars and practitioners who are studying hazards and disasters. The collection includes bound documents, serials, reports, journal articles, video tapes, and compact discs.

HazLit, the library's searchable online database, provides access to the full collection of the library. HazLit offers users the opportunity to easily search the library's holdings and identify the publications they need. The database is updated weekly.

In addition to this online service, for a fee, the Natural Hazards Center can conduct extensive custom searches of its library collection. Feel free to ask us hazards-related questions too! We are happy to guide your research or put you in touch with people or institutions that may have the answers you need.

The Natural Hazards Center would like to thank the Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI) for funding the HazLit upgrade project.