This catastrophic fire ' which is thought to have spread from building to building via burning bamboo scaffolding and fanned by strong winds ' highlights how difficult it is to evacuate high-rise buildings in an emergency. Evacuations of high-rises don't happen every day, but occur often enough. And when they do, the consequences are almost always severe. The stakes are highest in the buildings that are full at predictable times: residential towers at night, office towers in the day. Stair descent in real evacuations is far slower than most people expect. Under controlled or drill conditions people move down at around 0.4'0.7 metres per second. But in an actual emergency, especially in high-rise fires, this can drop sharply. Fatigue is a major factor. Prolonged walking significantly reduces the speed of descent. Surveys conducted after incidents confirm that a large majority of high-rise evacuees stop at least once. During the 2010 fire of a high-rise in Shanghai, nearly half of older survivors reported slowing down significantly....

Research two of us ' Carson MacPherson-Krutsky and Mary Painter ' did with researcher Melissa Villarreal shows only 4 in 10 Colorado residents have opted in to receive local emergency alerts. And many alerts may not be written with complete information, translated into the languages residents speak, or put into formats accessible to people with vision or hearing loss. This means some of our most vulnerable neighbors could miss crucial information during a crisis. Alerts are complex. They can come from a variety of official sources, including 911 centers, weather forecast centers and others. Alerts can also come in many forms, ranging from emails and texts to sirens and radio broadcasts. These fires were destructive and highlighted issues related to emergency alerting. Alerts about the fires and calls to evacuate were delayed and inconsistently received. Most were only available in English despite census data that shows 1 in 10 residents of Eagle and Garfield counties speak Spanish at home and only 'speak English less than 'very well.''...

Donald Trump has figured out the cheat code for authoritarianism: Fake emergencies bring real power. The president has invoked emergency authority in three distinct contexts'declaring a public-safety emergency to defend his takeover of the District of Columbia; claiming an 'invasion' to justify an immigration crackdown, including sending the National Guard to Los Angeles; and invoking 'extraordinary' factors to support his tariff war. Although Trump is not the first president to grab greater powers behind the cloak of emergency authority, he is the first to have done so in such an extreme way. Worse yet, the lack of resistance from Congress or the courts suggests that there is little, if anything, to prevent Trump from expanding his use of 'emergency' authority even further as he accumulates power. Emergency powers exist for good reason. In democratic societies, the general rule is that the legislative branch defines what the executive branch should do, and then the executive acts on the direction of the legislature....

As the nation looks back on the disaster 20 years later, I believe as a crisis and emergency management specialist that it is more important than ever to remember Katrina's lessons to avoid repeating past mistakes. When Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, its storm surge broke through levees protecting the city. Water quickly poured into low-lying neighborhoods, flooding houses up to their rooftops and inundating an estimated 80% of the city. People who could not evacuate before the storm and were lucky enough to escape to their roofs were stranded for days in some cases. Once the water had receded and the death toll counted, it became clear that nearly 1,400 people had died as a result of this devastating storm. The hurricane did more than $100 billion in damage, equivalent to about US$170 billion today when adjusted for inflation. While there were many unsung heroes during Katrina, the tragic missteps and missed opportunities at all levels of government emergency management are what no emergency manager ever wants to repeat. The response failed in many areas, from broken communications among federal, state and local agencies to the reported horrors in the Superdome as 16,000 evacuees faced failed generators, poor security, dwindling supplies and overflowing toilets....