Scott Gabriel Knowles

Troubled Waters: The National Flood Insurance Program in Historical Perspective

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—an effort to provide governmentbacked insurance protection to Americans living in flood-prone areas—was championed by Lyndon B. Johnson and established by Congress through passage of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968.3 Private flood insurers had retreated from the market following the great 1927 Mississippi River flood; and serious attempts to create a flood insurance program only began again in the 1950s, with actions by both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that eventually stalled.4 The impetus to pass the NFIP finally came in reaction to the escalating costs of ad hoc post-disaster relief legislation, triggered initially by the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and followed by severe flooding and damage from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, America’s first billion dollar hurricane.5 The NFIP was implemented in the midst of a remarkable population shift to hurricane-vulnerable states and coastal counties. For example, since 1950 Florida’s astounding 579% growth rate was the highest in the nation, raising it from 20th to 4th in population. Texas grew at a rate of 226%, moving its population rank to second in the nation. Other hurricane hazard states like Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Virginia were among the fastest states growing in the nation.6 As of 2010, 39% of Americans live in coastal shoreline counties, a remarkable increase of almost 40% since 1970—with population densities six times greater in shoreline counties than inland counties.7 While the concentration of population in coastal regions has created wealth, it has also placed vastly more people and more property in previously undeveloped floodplains and hurricane zones, and into harm’s way. This trend in development is a

Defending Philadelphia A Historical Case Study of Civil Defense in the Early Cold War

The city of Philadelphia, today, is in the midst of revamping its plans for emergency preparedness. For a city of its size, age, and infrastructural complexity, this presents a number of critical challenges. This article examines the last era in which emergency preparedness—in the form of early cold war civil defense—stood at the forefront of the city’s challenges. This article develops a historical case study of Philadelphia’s civil defense efforts against atomic attack in the 1950s, especially in the earliest planning and implementation stages under retired Major General Norman D. Cota. Civil defense failed in Philadelphia, as it did across the nation, and this article considers in detail the role that Cota’s “command- and-control” methods led to this failure.

Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of Technology

For a long time the historiographies of engineering and technology focused on technological intensification and progress across society, the economy, and government. Little specific attention was reserved in these narratives for risk, disaster, failure, and blame. However, more recently a vibrant, interdisciplinary synthesis of science and technology-focused disaster research has emerged in the form of a definable Disaster-STS, a subfield with close connections to engineering studies. This revisionist project inserts the contingencies of risk and the prevalence of disaster into the more traditional episodes of modern American technology history, such as urban industrialization and systems development, the rise of technical professions, postwar nuclear and other high-risk systems, and the history of postwar metropolitan growth. By expanding our view to include risk and disaster we explain the emergence of key engineering tools such as risk and cost–benefit analysis – and we chart the rise and elaboration of previously obscured technical artifacts like standards, codes, and techniques of risk management fostered by engineers working in risky environments. We come to a fuller understanding of failure as a “designed in” aspect of systems building. We note the push and pull of societal expectations of technological safety. Disasters have also created unique spaces of technical inquiry – post-disaster studies, investigations, and hearings–which have also strongly influenced codes of ethics, liability calculations, engineering education, and professionalization more generally.

The orbital technosphere: The provision of meaning and matter by satellites:

With a new ‘technosphere’ concept, Peter Haff offers a provocative reconceptualization of technology in Anthropocene, not as derivative consequence of human activity, but as a new ‘quasi-autonomous’ sphere of the environment that conditions human survival within the Earth System. Paying attention to the expansion of the orbital satellites in outer space, this paper suggests that technosphere analysis needs to conceptualize specific histories of the planetary-scale technology while considering how these technologies provide the epistemological basis and limitations for the technosphere. Satellites enhance the capacity of the technosphere as a system and provide systemic knowledge that is the basis for the meaning of the technosphere concept. Yet, this expansion is rooted in the contingencies of earthly geopolitics and the continual breakdown of technology – in this instance as a space debris layer formed in orbit around Earth that endangers the technosphere itself.

Engineering risk and disaster: a special issue of Engineering Studies

Design and disaster were once thought to be separate spheres, one committed to the beauty and rationality of the planned and the other a realm of random accident and distress. This special issue of...