I read an article today that had good guidelines for what to do in the event of a shooting at your workplace. It was written with libraries in mind, but any place, whether library, campus, hospital, business, etc., would benefit from reading it. I thought it would be helpful in devising education on workplace violence and made the appropriate person aware of the article. It was just published and is available freely under a creative commons licence. Here's the link:
http://journals.tdl.org/llm/article/view/1864/1625
Here's the citation: Kautzman, Amy and Jennifer Little. Active Shooter in the Library: How to Plan for, Prevent, and Survive the Worst (and Selected Bibliography). Library Leadership & Management, Vol 25, No 1 (2011)
The bibliography included this book:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.
I downloaded the Kindle edition, which incidentally is the first book I've bought for the Kindle that did NOT have text-to-speech enabled. (It also cannot be lent, which is unfortunate, because the person I forwarded the information to does have a Kindle and I would have liked for her to read it when I was finished.) But I digress...
It deals with the psychology involved when people are caught up in disaster, types of reactions, and what helps a person survive. It also stresses the power of interactions within groups and how people going through the emergency really are the first responders. One example she gives of this last point is a gas explosion that ripped through a large part of a city in Mexico a few years ago. People within the community were doing things like jacking up rubble with car jacks and using garden hoses to get air to those trapped, little decisions that meant survival for some. Of those who survived, almost all were recovered within the first two hours. Although emergency response teams were organised, that took time. The first rescue dogs, for example arrived over a day afterwards. Likewise, when looking at the 7/7 bombings in London, it became plain that emergency plans were made for the authorities, not for the people undergoing the emergency. There was no way for passengers to let authorities know of the explosion, the doors could not be opened by passengers, and first aid kits were kept in station offices rather than on the trains themselves. While these were apparent with hindsight, they never were caught in the actual planning scenarios.
Ripley uses interviews with survivors of disasters large and small and experts who work disasters, analyse them, and plan for them, to get a sense of how people do or do not survive disasters. Sometimes, of course, no matter what you do, nothing really can help. But although we put a lot of blame on nature, God, or the authorities, there's very little preparation for the general public on how to react. For example, how many of us have received training on surviving a terrorist attack? Of course not--we're just given colour-coded alerts that frighten us momentarily and then we return to business as usual, as Ripley points out.
I've only read the introduction and part of chapter one and I'm already hooked. I think it will be well worth the read. But you may want to check into it too, if you're interested in psychology, disaster planning, etc. And check out the article, too. Thanks to Susan Yowell for sending the link to the DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB list.
No comments:
Post a Comment