Happy Thanksgiving!

View on Threads

So sad

South Korea Ferry: Heartbreaking Video Shows Last Minutes Aboard

Clips of the 15-minute recording show teens nervously calling the ferry their "Titanic" and saying "These are the pictures we need to take as our last memories." The teenagers talk of taking selfies, wonder if they'll make the news and discuss posting about the excitement later on Facebook.

The fear in the cabin builds as the listing becomes worse. Some say they feel dizzy, that their legs are shaking. One student can be seen walking with his hands braced against the wall for balance.

"Am I really going to die?" a student asks at 8:53 a.m., two minutes before a crew member on the bridge made the ferry's first distress call.

Students ask whether the ship will sink and where their teachers are. "What's the captain doing?"

Several times they are warned over the loudspeaker to stay where they are, even as the tilting increases and it becomes less possible for them to flee.

More than 300 people are dead or missing in the tragedy. About 220 bodies, mostly from inside the submerged vessel, have so far been recovered. More than 80 percent of the victims were students from one high school in Ansan, south of Seoul, on their way to the southern tourist island of Jeju for a school trip.

How very sad

Bodies found after landslide buries Chinese school

The bodies of 18 children have been found after a landslide buried elementary school students and a villager in southwest China, state media said Friday. Rescuers found the bodies as they scoured through rubble at a village after the landslide struck the school and two houses in Yunnan province, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

One person is still missing, CCTV reported.

The students were studying Thursday during a public holiday to make up for classes disrupted by recent earthquakes.

Since then, another body has been found, according to:

Death toll rises to 19 in SW China landslide

My thoughts are with the families of those lost.

An excellent article about how to prepare for (and survive) a shooting at your library

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.

Getting ready for 2012? This isn't your grandpa's fallout shelter

Take Shelter in a Human Habitrail

Kennedy-era fallout shelters were little more than cement boxes filled with cans of spinach. Modern end-time housing structures, like those from Radius Engineering, are smart and stylish. Take the Trogonia 8, a modular, self-sufficient, radiation-proof colony—complete with fitness center, restaurants, and city hall—that will keep as many as 2,000 people safe and snug for up to five years. With that kind of thing, you can Noah’s ark the whole subdivision.

And of course, there's Surviving the Apocalypse Hollywood Style to use as a handy guide. :) They even mention the series 'Ark II' (always helps to have a super-techie RV).

My mind is reeling at the scope of this loss to history

HISTORY IN RUINS: Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians

The Historical Archive of Köln (Cologne in English) collapsed Tuesday, leaving two people missing and presumed dead and millions of documents, photographs, books, and other archival items imperiled. So far 9,000 documents have been recovered, a small percentage of a collection that took up 18 kilometres of shelving and spanned two millennia. Köln's archives were very rare because they survived the destruction of the World War II era completely intact. It was also the largest municipal archive in Germany.

When I was working on my thesis on Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a native of Köln, I benefited from other scholars who had studied the humanist and occultist by poring over documents in this very archive. I would love to have been able to go myself.

Now much of that history may be lost. When I think of my emotions, it is not so much sad as horrified. It reminds us how fragile our connexion to the past can be, and the importance of archivists, librarians, and historians in maintaining that connexion. I so hope that more can be saved, and that they can rig up some device to protect against rain as they try to unearth these precious holdings.

Although I'd seen the story in a variety of media, this particular link is courtesy of Steven from Library Stuff.

Photos can be accessed through the article, but these were particularly riveting, I thought:

Building as it was before collapse - After the collapse: View 1 - View 2 - View 3

You can also see an aerial view in this video.

The building is gone, leaving only huge chunks of concrete. Let us hope that treasures may be found under the rubble, but it will be an arduous task that will be painstakingly slow compared to clearing most rubble, due to the great care necessary to preserve the documents. I wish them well.