IOL.co.za says that KwaZulu-Natal’s continuous cycle of losing homes, rebuilding, and waiting for the next devastating floods has left communities emotionally drained and struggling to cope with the mental toll of disaster fatigue. The disaster-prone province has endured wave after wave of devastating floods, each leaving behind a trail of destruction, displacement, and grief.

Dr Kerry Frizelle, a counselling psychologist at the University of the Western Cape, said survivors of repeated disasters, such as the KZN floods, are experiencing disaster fatigue, a form of emotional exhaustion that has long-term consequences.

“The literature refers to disaster fatigue as a form of emotional exhaustion that builds up and occurs in response to disasters that happen repeatedly. Essentially, emotional fatigue results in demotivation and a decrease in behaviours that would help to address the disaster,” said Frizelle.

In April 2022, KZN was hit by one of the deadliest floods South Africa has ever recorded. Torrential rains caused rivers to swell, roads to collapse, and homes to be washed away. Over 430 people lost their lives, and thousands were left homeless as entire neighbourhoods in eThekwini, OThongathi, and surrounding areas were submerged.

Last month, another round of flash floods hit eThekwini, killing seven people and displacing many others. Roads and infrastructure damaged in 2022 still had not been fully repaired when the latest storms arrived. And weeks later, another deadly storm claimed two more lives. For some, it was the second time they had lost everything.

The repeated trauma of rebuilding only to lose everything again has left many frustrated.

Dr Frizelle explained that when disasters strike the same communities over and over again, this exhaustion evolves into community fatigue, where entire neighbourhoods feel defeated and less able to plan for future disasters.

“When a single disaster occurs, it is likely that you will see community mobilization and collective initiatives to respond and recover. But when the events persist or recur, people are likely to run out of physical and emotional resources.”

“They feel demotivated and helpless and are therefore less likely to respond as they would the first time the disaster occurred.”

She also linked disaster fatigue to the brain’s natural survival mechanisms.

“In dangerous or stressful situations, people’s brains and nervous systems are designed to activate the fight or flight response, they either actively confront the threat or try to escape it,” she explained.

“If neither of these is possible, the third response – freeze – occurs. This might explain what happens with disaster fatigue.”

Clearly, this is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in a different guise. Thanks to IOL for quoting Dr Frizelle.

The ARRL reports that the San Joaquin Valley Section conducted “Perfect Storm,” an amateur radio emergency exercise, on March 5 – 7.

 Section Emergency Coordinator (SEC) Dan Sohn, WL7COO, asked that a section-wide exercise be created that would engage both amateur radio operators and non-amateurs to become more active in their community’s emergency preparedness and response capabilities.

 There were 120 participants from 9 counties within the Section, and both amateurs and participants equipped with General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) radios gathered local situational awareness data. The exercise culminated with a two-hour period during which local groups forwarded their data to a mock Incident Command Post. At the same time, leaders of the groups were asked to participate in a live “hot wash” on Zoom, where the results were reviewed, and errors could be corrected in real time.

SJV Section Manager Steven Hendricks, KK6JTB, said the Perfect Storm exceeded expectations and SEC Sohn reported the exercise was a resounding success.

“We wanted to engage many different organizations and especially young hams,” said Hendricks. “It’s important to tap into their excitement and engage them so that, when a disaster does strike, they can become a vital part of the team.”  They plan to hold two similar such exercises per year in the future.

Here’s a brilliant idea, even if it is still functioning in its infancy.

A trio of physicists from Princeton University, CIT’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Spectral Sensor Solutions, is proposing the possibility of generating electricity using energy from the rotation of the Earth. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Research, Christopher Chyba, Kevin Hand and Thomas Chyba tested a theory that electricity could be generated from the Earth’s rotation using a special device that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Over the past decade, members of the team have been toying with the idea of generating electricity using the Earth’s rotation and its magnetic field, and they even published a paper describing the possibility back in 2016. That paper was met with criticism because prior theories have suggested that doing so would be impossible because any voltage created by such a device would be canceled as the electrons rearrange themselves during the generation of an electric field.

The researchers wondered what would happen if this cancelation was prevented and the voltage instead captured. To find out, they built a special device consisting of a cylinder made of manganese-zinc ferrite, a weak conductor, which served as a magnetic shield. They then oriented the cylinder in a north-south direction set at a 57° angle. That made it perpendicular to both the Earth’s rotational motion and the Earth’s magnetic field.

Next, they placed electrodes at each end of the cylinder to measure voltage and then turned out the lights to prevent photoelectric effects. They found that 18 microvolts of electricity were generated across the cylinder that they could not attribute to any other source, strongly suggesting that it was due to the energy from the Earth’s rotation.

The researchers note that they accounted for the voltage that might have been caused by temperature differences between the ends of the cylinder. They also noted that no such voltage was measured when they changed its angle or used control cylinders.

The results will have to be verified by others running the same type of experiment under different scenarios to ensure that there were no other sources of electricity generation that they failed to account for. But the researchers note that if their findings turn out to be correct, there is no reason the amount produced could not be increased to a useful level.

Thank you to Phys.org/news for that enticing idea. If it is possible to scale the process up, we’d have a large amount of energy constantly available.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, feeling dizzy at the thought of all the effects of rotation, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.