The Sept. 11 evacuation of the World Trade Center will be addressed by USA Today reporter Martha Moore at the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center's 28th annual workshop to be held in Boulder July 13-16.
The event will bring together about 350 researchers and front-line managers who deal with the impacts of terrorist attacks and extreme natural events such as earthquakes and hurricanes. The workshop, which is not open to the public, will be at the Millennium Harvest House at 1345 28th St. in Boulder.
Michael Brown, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Byrne, director of the Homeland Security unit that protects Washington, D.C., are scheduled to be among the participants.
Moore, who has both written and spoken about the World Trade Center evacuation, will give the keynote address from 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Monday, July 14.
The Sept. 11 attacks had a major impact on the work of people who deal with natural disasters, said Professor Dennis Mileti, chair of the CU-Boulder sociology department and director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center. In terms of physical impacts, the Sept. 11 attacks were indistinguishable from natural events such as great earthquakes and hurricanes, he said.
The agency responsible for responding to catastrophic natural events, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is now part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
This year's workshop topics include "All Hazard Management and Mitigation in a New Bureaucracy," "Managing Fear and Anxiety in the Future: Challenges for Emergency Managers," "Communicating Emergency Warnings to the Public: An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art" and "Looking Back and Moving Forward: Lessons Learned and Long-Term Effects of Sept. 11."
Addressing another type of disaster, a four-hour field trip on Sunday, July 13, will address the growing threat of wildfires as more and more people move into forested areas of the West.
The Natural Hazards Workshop was launched in 1976 and includes invited participants from across the United States and several other nations.
The Natural Hazards Center, part of CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science, is funded by a consortium of agencies including the National Science Foundation and FEMA. The center serves as an information clearinghouse for disaster professionals and publishes several periodicals including a newsletter sent to more than 15,000 recipients around the world.
For information visit the center's Web site at .