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The United States has no comprehensive national warning strategy that covers all hazards in all places. Instead, public warning practices are decentralized across different governments and the private sector. Uneven preparedness to issue warnings exists across local communities; hence, people are unevenly protected from the surprise onset of natural disasters. Without changes in this situation, inequalities will grow larger, and the gains made in saving lives over the past decades may well be reversed. Since the first assessment of research on natural hazards was completed in 1975, there have been significant improvements in forecasts and warnings for some hazards but only marginal improvements for others. Forecasts for floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions have improved most significantly, and public dissemination of warnings has improved the most for hurricanes. However, a 100% reliable warning system does not exist for any hazard. TABLE 1. Improvements in Prediction, Forecast, and Warning Integration Hazard (1) Prediction/forecast (2) Warning integration (3)

We registered all new injuries among 496 male youth soccer players, aged 12 to 18 years, during the course of one year. The incidence of injury was 3.7 injuries per 1000 hours of soccer per player. The incidence increased with age, and at the higher ages within the youth players, approached the incidence rate of senior players (age greater than or equal to 18 years). Seventy percent of the injuries were located in the lower extremities, particularly the knee (26%) and ankle (23%). Back pain occurred in 14% of players. Fractures, which accounted for 4% of injuries, were most often in the upper extremities. We conclude that youth soccer is a relatively low-risk sport with an injury pattern that differs slightly from that of senior players.

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Sorensen, J.H. and Mileti, D.S., 1988. Warning and evacuation: answering some basic questions. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 2: 195-209. In this paper we address five questions that are frequently asked in the context of emergency planning for various accidents and disasters. These questions are commonly voiced by emergency managers or planners wanting a better basis for developing emergency response plans. The questions are frequently answered by people who have an image of how people behave in an emergency; often, however, their observations are inaccurate and misleading. The questions are as follows. First, how long does it take to warn a population about a crisis? Second, how many people evacuate in an emergency situation? Third, when do people evacuate? Fourth, do people evacuate unnecessarily? Fifth, where do people go when they evacuate?The major findings are as follows. First, most emergency response systems, which typically consist of law enforcement, firefighting and other civic employees, and sometimes volunteers, coupled with emergency use of available electronic media, can issue an effective warning given three or four hours of lead time. In some situations, when the threat is urgent, a warning can be disseminated in a much more rapid fashion. In situations with less than one hour of available warning time, some, and perhaps a substantial portion of the population will not receive a warning.Second, the speed of warning dissemination, particularly in urgent situations, is increased by informal warning processes. People seek information following the receipt of the warning and one common way to do so is to contact Downloaded from 196 friends, relatives or neighbors. In some of the situations studied, 50% of the initial warning was attributable to informal notification processes. Third, when advised or ordered to take a protective action such as evacuation, few people respond instantaneously except when there is a recognized and immediate threat. The length of time it takes for people to respond is variable among events, depending on the available time to impact and the severity of the threat. In any event, people are unlikely to take action simultaneously; rather it will be spread out over time.