Scott Gabriel Knowles, author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America, hits the public radio airwaves and web sites today to discuss America's emergency preparedness ten years after the September 11th attacks.
Knowles was interviewed for American Public Media Marketplace report on the economic empact of 9/11. Knowles said of 1990s disaster policy:
"There is no such thing as a natural disaster" — became a kind of phrase used at that time, to say that, disasters are of our own making. We build in a flood plain. We build on a fault line. And that was really gathering steam throughout the 1990s. And so, then, 9/11 happens and it pushes that consensus aside.
Today at noon eastern time, Knowles will be on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show.
Knowles is Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and the editor of Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City.
