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Catastrophe by choice: the need to create a culture of warning and safety

 


Disasters are not normal. We – humanity and society – create them and we can choose to prevent them.

It is mentioned that natural disasters do not exist because humans cause catastrophes that appear to be madly provocative. We see nature destroying our lives all the time: from an underwater city after a storm roaring off the Atlantic Ocean to rows of burning homes after a dust fire to the dust rising from the rubble after the earthquake.

How can we withstand hurricane winds of 250 miles an hour faster than bullet trains in Japan, or a lava temperature of 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than potters’ ovens? How would we feel if an “expert” warned us that this was not a mistake by nature, as we examined the few pictures that were saved from the wreck pile of our house and life in the past?

However, even when we cannot sustain our infrastructure, we can prevent people from dying, we can protect our most precious possessions, and we can learn to deal with devastation. The disaster does not lie in the forces that unleashed its nature, but in deaths and injuries, irreparable loss of homes and livelihoods, and failure to support those affected, so that the short-term outage becomes a nightmare of long-term recovery.

New York’s National Guard loads cars with meals to distribute to those in quarantine because of COVID-19. (Credit: National Guard)

Even the COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural disaster. We know that new viruses appear and infect us all the time. We could have improved our monitoring and response to emerging diseases, which means – at least – not to silence and intimidate health professionals who report something. Long before that, we must build strong health systems and health coverage, so that countries are confident in caring for the sick population. Then follow the long-saved epidemic plans that would have told the world how to deal with the new coronavirus without becoming a pandemic, forcing many of us to close for weeks.

Hurricane, earthquake, and virus are not responsible for our decisions.

They are manifestations of the nature that has occurred countless times throughout the ages of Earth’s history. Disaster consists of our inability to treat it as part of nature. We have the knowledge, ability, technology and resources to build windless homes at 250 miles per hour. If we choose that, we can create a culture with warning and safe harbor.

It is difficult to ride lava at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and a higher tsunami than ours. But we can avoid places where it is likely to be exposed or we can create a culture that understands and accepts periodic destruction, again with warning and safe evacuation, to allow rapid reconstruction afterwards. The basis is that we have choices regarding where we live, how we build, and how we prepare to live with nature.

Many of the choices we make currently allow death and destruction. It creates conditions for disasters, not nature.

Inequality, underdevelopment and marginalization

January 12, 2020 marks the tenth anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, killing at least 150,000 people and possibly doubling that number, the vast majority of whom are poor Haitians living in inadequate housing. However, knowledge of Haitian earthquakes spans centuries, as many previous earthquakes were seen across the country and recorded.

Despite this knowledge of earthquakes, few measures were taken.

Why was the infrastructure in and around the capital poorly constructed? Why were so many people poor, and they had no choice but to live in these buildings without any hope of improving them? Why aren’t so many wealthy parties, from the head of state to the United Nations to luxury hotel developers, the basic principles of earthquake safety?

These questions were asked in 2010: A meeting on disaster management in Haiti, highlighting seismic safety, concluded on January 12, 2010, when the earthquake struck.

Massive phenomena, underdevelopment and marginalization prevented a quick fix. Haiti, as a country, is not particularly poor or under-resourced, but the magnitude of the disparity is shocking. For centuries, all of these problems have not been easy to solve or solve.

It takes time to construct tens of thousands of buildings that barely lasted a minute on January 12, 2010. It takes time to create a city full of informal settlements, without basic services, and lacks planning regulations, building codes, and institutions to monitor and enforce such laws.

It takes production of a culture of daily hustle over exposed electrical wires, through random accesses, and around informal structures. The earthquake lasts a few seconds, but it takes decades and centuries to build a community that accepts infrastructure that cannot withstand earthquakes – creating vulnerability that creates disaster.

A family awaits treatment at the Red Cross first aid center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. (Credit: American Red Cross)

Man-made vulnerability

The same thing with recent forest fires in Australia. The country has good reason to fear such fires. Wednesday’s inconsistently named Ash fires on February 16, 1983, killed 75 people across two states in 12 hours. Tasmania lost 62 people in the Black Tuesday fires on February 7, 1967.

The deadliest Australian forest fire disaster occurred exactly 42 years later on February 7, 2009, or Black Saturday: 173 people died and 414 were injured.

Indigenous Australians managed fires for tens of thousands of years. They put controlled fires to change the environment to keep tracks, trapping animals, and avoiding the accumulation of combustible fuel that could lead to major fires.

Over time, indigenous practices have adapted ecosystems to support plant species that can withstand low-intensity forest fires, and in fact use fire for reproduction. Fires were part of land use and land administration, and were incorporated into human needs among other environmental modifications, although we really do not know how many fire disasters may have been caused by the indigenous Australians nor how many have died in the fire.

Europeans imported and imposed a different perspective of forest fires. Fire was always supposed to be dangerous and devastating, so it was suppressed and fought. As the settlements expanded into the bush, the fires became very devastating and fatal, which further strengthened the combat situation.

2020 fires continue this pattern. Despite the heat wave, fire intensity and extent, much more could have been done in the long run to avoid the catastrophe we have seen. Over the past decades, cities and towns have expanded dramatically in combustible areas.

Homeowners can design and maintain their homes and lands to reduce the chance of catching them during a forest fire. There are no guarantees at all to save the property, but we saw the difference in Australia this year between those who survived their homes and those who unfortunately lost everything or who died tragically while staying on the defense.

The key is preparing years ago, including preparing for home loss, knowing that fires are part of the ecosystem and can happen in any year, even if they are now more intense and extensive in scale due to human-induced climate change. The primary cause of Australian forest fire disasters has been to create environmental vulnerability, regardless of what the fire hazards do.

A firefighter from the US Bureau of Land Management assists in Australian forest fires in January. (Credit: BLMIdaho)

A way forward

For environmental events and processes that we can deal with by reducing vulnerability, and most of them, we are the real causes of disasters, not nature. Unintentionally or intentionally, in knowledge or in ignorance, disasters arise through human choices, actions, behavior, and values. It is not easy to close this gap between what we know and actually use this knowledge.

Some people aim to change the basics, focusing on the big picture in order to overcome the underlying causes of weakness. Discrimination, poverty, inequality and incompetence fuel disaster.

Others prefer working on smaller metrics and less ambitious steps. They show more direct, tangible, and more immediate positive effects, which they hope will eventually reach wider and deeper changes. Examples are forest management to allow small forest fires and earthquake retrofit characteristics, all while changing our behavior so that we can withstand forest fires and earthquakes without damage.

One approach does not prevent the other. We can practice both together, so they can complement each other rather than hinder them. After all, the chronic human conditions of vulnerability that cause disasters are constantly present and must be addressed, at all levels, especially over the long term. This means that disasters do not appear quickly. Instead of an event, we should realize that disaster is a long-term process.

Some hazards quickly unleash their powers and energies with little specific warning. Although we know widely where earthquakes can strike at any time, such as Haiti and Jamaica, we cannot yet predict an earthquake in a specific place at a specific time. We know widely where hurricanes can strike, including Haiti and Jamaica as well, and we can notice progress of a particular hurricane, but we can’t predict a few days in advance when and where a major storm may occur. We know that Haiti and Jamaica are vulnerable to earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, epidemics and many other hazards due to long-term social inequality and insufficient infrastructure.

Thus, in the same way that disasters are not natural, they are not unusual or severe. It greatly reveals the weaknesses of people, and others force them to live on a daily basis.

We can prevent their “natural disasters” and their human suffering, despite the presence of significant environmental risks, by reducing vulnerabilities. We must actively choose to do so.

Ilan Keelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England, and second professor at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

This is an excerpt excerpted from Disaster by Choice by Ilan Kelman, published by Oxford University Press on May 1, and available in hard copy and eBook.

Banner photo: Texas National Guard soldiers arrive in Houston, Texas, to help citizens in areas severely flooded by Hurricane Harvey. (Credit: National Guard)

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