The Zeebrugge ferry disaster

On Friday 6 March, 1987, at approximately 19:30 the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry boat capsized just outside the Belgian harbour of Zeebrugge. Almost 200 people died as the ship sank very quickly. This article examines the emergency operations that followed the disaster from the perspective of information and communication dynamics. Five specific aspects are thus analyzed in greater detail and elements of an alternative scenario are suggested for each of them: the initial alert and the subsequent mobilization of the emergency services; the informationhandling performance of the crisis center; interorganizational communication between disasterrelief agencies; external communication to survivors, families and next of kin; the management of the mass media. It is concluded that, when examining the crisis management operations more closely, the alleged success of Belgian disaster relief operations at Zeebrugge appears in many respects something of a myth.The paper is commented on by John P. Heck, Head of Civil Defense at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior.     

Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission,the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title

In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people's rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In keeping with the latter approach, this article seeks to recover the manner in which the indigenous people's interests in land were treated in the British colony of South Australia at the time it was founded in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. It emphasises the manner in which the colonisers, the South Australian Colonisation Commission, rather than the British Colonial Office, deployed a range of legal arguments, especially in the context of political negotiations between these two parties. It concludes that the imperial government's treatment of indigenous interests in land was primarily determined by its perception of the relationships of power on the ground between the colonial state, the settlers and the Aboriginal people rather than by its application of any particular legal principle or norm.     

DNA analysis in perpetrator identification of terrorism-related disaster: Suicide bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta 2004

We report the strategy that we employed to identify the perpetrator of a suicide car bombing in front of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on 9 September 2004. The bomb was so massive that only small tissue pieces of the perpetrator could be recovered, preventing conventional approach to the identification of the bomber, necessitating the introduction of DNA analysis as the primary means for perpetrator identification. Crime scene investigation revealed the trajectory of the bomb blast, which was used to guide the collection of charred tissue fragments of the perpetrator. Mitochondrial DNA analysis was first conducted on 17 tissue fragments, recovered over large areas of the trajectory to, (a) confirm that they are of a common source, i.e. the perpetrator, and thus (b) establish the mtDNA HV1 sequence profile of the perpetrator. The mtDNA of the perpetrator matches that of a maternally related family member of one of four suspects. Standard autosomal STR analysis confirmed the identification. This case is of interest as an illustration of a successful application of DNA analysis as the primary means of disaster perpetrator identification.     

全球重大灾难对中国城市防灾减灾的警示

文章简介了近年我国若干城市安全减灾应急工作及系统的快速发展，阐述了我国国家、省市及社会安全减灾应急现状，SARS及印度洋特大地震海啸灾害对其的促进和警示教训；进而纵论国际安全减灾应急体系近年概况，美、俄、日、法等国近年建立部级政府机构由来；最后指出我国这一领域的问题并提出我国安全减灾应急体系建设的体制、机制、法制；经费及国际合作等相应建议。