In response to concern about strengthening the nation's ability to protect its population and way of life (i.e., security) and ability to adapt and recover from emergencies (i.e., resilience), the President of the United States issued Presidential Policy Directive 8: National Preparedness (PPD-8) (1). Signed on March 30, 2011, PPD-8 is a directive for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to...

Background: Resistance of Staphylococcus aureus to commonly used antibiotics is linked to their ability to acquire and disseminate antimicrobial-resistant determinants in nature, and the marine environment may serve as a reservoir for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This study determined the antibiotic sensitivity profile of S.aureus isolated from selected beach water and intertidal beach sand i...

Abstract After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the State of Louisiana received federal Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) assistance, administered by Office (OCD) as Road Home Program, to provide homeowners with required matching funds for elevating damaged homes under Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Program (HMGP). This research eval...

Introduction: The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a publicly available National Risk Index (NRI) using natural disaster and community risk factor data to provide numeric visual representations of communities’ risk. Of particular interest is the index’s use social vulnerability resilience variables. This study’s purpose was identify explore differences in based on racia...

To assess the performance criteria of the reinforced-concrete, five-storey residential buildings common in Iran, an &#10experimental study in the structural laboratory of the University of Tehran has been conducted. The test program includes cyclic and monotonic load tests of six beams that represent three-to-five storey buildings with rigid frame structures. Using definitions given in FEMA-356...

Working canines are deployed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as part of a National Disaster Response Plan. Stress associated with helicopter flight and the resulting physical effects on the dog are unknown. Our objective was to test the hypotheses that (1) helicopter travel affects the physiology and faecal microbiota of working canines, but that (2) physiological consequence...

Working canines are deployed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as part of a National Disaster Response Plan. Stress associated with helicopter flight and the resulting physical effects on the dog are unknown. Our objective was to test the hypotheses that (1) helicopter travel affects the physiology and faecal microbiota of working canines, but that (2) physiological consequence...

The societal, economic, and environmental impacts of weather events and climate conditions in the United States normally vary spatially across the nation, and for any given period such as a season or year, the impacts reveal a mix of regional winners and losers. This was certainly true with the impacts resulting from El Niño-generated weather during 1997–98. The early official predictions of mo...