“The Rubble's Standing Up” in Oroville,California: The Politics of Building Safety *

Disaster researchers have long been aware that the political context of mitigation and preparedness measures has a formidable impact on their initiation, adoption and implementation. Yet most discussion and reporting of the political aspects of disasters have remained anecdotal, and few scholars have attempted to incorporate systematically political forces into social science models applied to disaster phenomena. This paper represents an explicit attempt to describe and explain the impact of politics on the public policy debate over structural safety in Oroville. California, following a damaging 1975 earthquake.