Community building through risk communication infrastructures

From the early moments after the release of MIC in Bhopal, India, practitioners and theorists worked feverishly for a model to use to describe how communication could best be brought to serve the interest of people at risk for various similar disasters. This discussion was not really new. Throughout history, in various ways by many inventive means, human society has been deeply engaged in discussions that can understand, mitigate, and manage risks, however individually or collectively. Despite this legacy, in the days after a crisis results from the manifestation of a risk, members of society are likely to turn to one or more individuals for answers to why the risk occurred and to whether those who were affected deserved to so suffer. Something of that kind of reasoning buzzed through media coverage in early 2006 after the 12 miners died and one lived at the Sago Mine in West Virginia.