A weekly round-up of news, articles and surveys to make your next emergency better. Have a suggestion for the round-up? Contact me at abetteremergency@gmail.com.

I found the proposed methods of insurance compensation for those impacted by disasters to be interesting, and would love to see outcome measurements against other methods of trying to make people, communities, and economies whole again after disasters. I wonder if we would have seen more progress in Aceh if they had such a disaster insurance program? The tsunami that devastated the area was nine years ago. If you wonder how much better prepared they are now, then I recommend this article.

I feel we’re only paying lip service to potentially damaging earthquakes on the West Coast of the United States, and concrete steps to mitigate deaths and destruction seems lacking. I started a LinkedIn discussion which raised the question of whether we need a disaster before we really took disaster preparedness seriously. It appears that earthquake readiness is still a low priority in Oklahoma. On the other hand, Sikkim is constructing 8,000 earthquake-resistant houses. A great start.

Why is it important to prepare? Seven weeks after Yolanda, there are still unburied corpses. With more heat waves and wildfires predicted, headlines like this one out of Cape Town could become more prevalent. How many regions are ready to meet the need?

Poor construction quality and personnel negligence helped lead to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. How many similar installations are operating today? The real problem with radiation releases is not the immediate impact, but the cumulative effects and health problems over time. These lessons learned from Japan are interesting.

I mentioned last week that Hawaii was at risk for a significant tsunami event. I’m going to give you reason to rethink your Caribbean vacation plans, too.

Having a rapid response capacity can help address key threats to human health from both acute onset injuries and also for chronic conditions, which can worsen under disaster conditions.

Last, maybe there is hope that with aggressive monitoring, we may be better able to quantify risk to specific areas and plan appropriately based upon predicted outcomes.