I'd like to share the final list of movies for the Disaster Film class I'll be teaching in the fall! #EMGTwitter
Before I do... some of you are going to be in a huff about certain movies not being included but I need y'all to be chill. (Some of you were not chill last time.)
I assure you have given this a lot of thought and this is what's best for this particular course and my particular students. This is set in stone so there's no negotiation that needs to happen.
Okay, here we go.
Disaster Film as Popular Culture: 100 Years of The Titanic
A Night to Remember (1958)
Disaster Films as an Avenue for Collective Anxiety
The China Syndrome (1979)
Disaster Films as Military Propaganda: The Civil Defense Era
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Disaster Film Through the Lens of Race, Class, & Gender
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Fact vs. Fiction: Disaster Film as a Voyage for Myth Making
Volcano (1997)
Disaster Film as Spectacle
San Andreas (2015)
Pandemics for Disaster Film Fodder
Contagion (2011)
The Art of Making A Disaster Film
Sharknado (2013)
Disaster Film: Disrupting Corporate Power
Erin Brockovich (2000)
The Next Era of Disaster Film: Climate Change
Beasts of The Southern Wild (2012)
"It's all just asteroids!"
Don’t Look Up (2021)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
With the flooding in NYC, many people are rightly concerned about how FEMA will be involved in the response given the (seemingly) impending shutdown.
I'm going to try and explain this as simply as possible based on my current understanding. #EMGTwitter
The Disaster Relief Fund is the pot of $ used to pay for response & recovery when a community receives a Presidential Declaration.
For months, FEMA & White House have been asking Congress to refill the Disaster Relief Fund because it was very low.
At the end of August FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell made the correct decision to implement “Immediate Needs Funding”. This meant FEMA stopped recovery payments across the country in an effort to conserve remaining funds for life-saving response efforts
People keep sending me this article so it's time for an uncomfortable thread about emergency managers. There is some really important context needed here. #EMGTwitter
I have found that in the midst of a response most people reveal they have a misperception about what and who emergency managers are...
The majority of emergency managers in the United States are only part-time. They usually double as the fire chief or are a retired firefighter
In the minority are our larger cities where you have emergency management agencies with dozens, and in a few cases, hundreds, of professional emergency managers/ related positions. Then there's everything in between.
The Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) is a ~$355 million annual grant program that gives a few million dollars to each state for preparedness-related needs.
This is not a perfect program but for now, it's what we have.
EMPG funding is used for a range of things including upgrading equipment, funding education programs, plan development, and most importantly paying emergency managers salaries.
Practitioners and academics have been very clear that this grant must be protected.
A fire in New England (or the northeast, generally) is one of the future disasters that keep me up at night. It's not just the conditions changing but that we don't have the capacity to respond.
We've done very little to prepare. The population has no clue how to respond, we don't have the people, or equipment to fight effectively. We don't have people with a depth of knowledge. We're not mitigating.
One of Mainer's favorite phrases - "you can't get there from here" would single-handedly leave us dead in the water in large swaths of Maine.
First of all, it's immediately clear that they have zero understanding of what FEMA does or how the US emergency management system works. As a result they're just parroting what a random group of people think FEMA should be doing... okay???
The most egregious part for me is that NYT is just fully repeating looting claims, specifically by undocumented people, with no evidence when we know this is extremely unlikely post-disaster. This contributes to racist narratives that put people of color at risk post-disaster.