Time to return to the findings of the 2000 Hurricane Floyd Conference. One of the key reports given was that of Dr. Dennis Mileti, the author of the Disasters by Design. Ironically a book that was published just a few months prior to Hurricane Floyd striking the Carolinas. Dr. Mileti is considered the top disaster expert in the country. If there was anything that the political leaders of this country should have been reading, it was the works of this man. He makes in quite clear that his report to the conference and in his own book that in any disaster, mankind plays a role.
In his introduction, the words are almost haunting (emphasis is mine)-
It has become clear that natural and technological disasters are not problems that can be solved in isolation. Rather, the occurence of a disaster is a symptom of broader and more basic problems. Often society creates its own disasters. Sometimes this participation is obvious, such as with technological disasters that result from human-created hazards – accidents at nuclear power plants (e.g., the Chernobyl and Three-mile Island disasters), spills of environmentally dangerous toxic pollutants, or the failure of flood-control structures to protect property and people. But human activities also directly increase the impact of natural hazards, both climatological (e.g., hurricanes, droughts, floods, fires. etc.) and geophysical (e.g., earthquakes, volcanos, landslides, etc.)
Since 1994 a team of over 100 expert academics and pratitioners, including members of the private sector, have assessed, evaluated, and summarized knowledge about natural and technological hazards in the United States from the perspectives of the physical, natural, social, and behavioral, and engineering sciences. This paper and the report on which it is based (Mileti 1999) reflect the efforts of these experts to take stock of Americans’ relationship to past, present, and, most importantly, future hazards. The major thesis of the findings is that losses resulting from hazards, and the fact that there seems to be an inability to reduce losses, are the consequences of narrow and short-sighted development patterns, cultural premises, and attitudes toward the natural environment, science, and technology. The contributions from this collaboration were used to outline a comprehensive approach to enhancing society’s ability to reduce the costs of disasters. We propose a way for people and the nation to take responsibility for disaster losses, to define future, acceptable levels of loss, and to link plans for minimizing impacts from disasters with sustainable development.
We will be getting to those proposes later, but think of what this man just said. There are problems folks. First, we need to understand that man has an impact on disasters – prior and after the event. These events may have been solely man-made or natural disasters enhanced by humans. Many are already argued if New Orleans was hit by one disaster or two (one natural and one man-made). I think that it doesn’t matter, either way at the end of the day thousands of Americans are dead and we all had a hand in it.
Now I could go on and on about how we needed to recognize the problem before Katrina struck, but let’s have Dr. Mileti continue his report and let him say it – back in 2000.
A quarter-century ago geographer Gilbert F. White and sociologist J. Eugene Haas published a pioneering report on the United States’s ability to withstand and respond to natural disasters (White and Haas 1975). At that time, physical scientists and engineers dominated research on disasters. As White and Haas pointed out in their “Assessment of Research on Natural Hazards, little attempt had been made to tap the social sciences to better understand the economic, social, and political dimensions of extreme natural events.
White and Haas attempted to fill this void. But they also advanced the critical notion that rather than simply picking up the pieces after disasters, the nation could employ better planning, land-use controls, and other preventive measures to reduce the toll in the first place. Today, at long last, public and private programs and policies have begun to adopt this approach as the cornorstone of the United States’s policy for addressing natural and technological hazards. The 1975 report also had a profound impact by paving the way for an interdisciplinary approach to research and management, giving birth to a “hazards community” – people from many fields and agencies who address the myriad aspects of natural disasters. Hazard research now encompasses disciplines such as climatology, economics, engineering, geography, geology, law, meteorology, planning, seismology, and sociology. Professionals in land-use management, planning for response and recovery, insurance, and building codes can help individuals and groups adapt to natural hazards, as well as reduce the resulting deaths, injuries, costs, and social and environmental, and economic disruption. These people have improved our understanding during and after disasters. Yet troubling questions remain about why more progress has not been made in reducing dollar losses.
One central problem to curtailing losses due to hazards is that many of the accepted methods for coping with hazards are based on the idea that people can use technology to control nature and make themselves safe. What’s more, most strategies for managing hazards have followed a traditional planning model: study the problem, implement one solution, and move on to the next problem. This approach cast disasters as static and problem solving as a one-size-fits-all process. But the impact of a disaster varies with the hazard type and intensity. A single solution cannot be applied across the range of disasters.
To redress this shortcoming, there must be a link between wise management of natural resources and local economic and social needs.
Now the first thing that pops into my head are the reports of brain-drain at FEMA and general lack of planning.
But many suspected that FEMA’s apparent problems in getting life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from New Orleans, delays even President Bush called “not acceptable,” stemmed partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have long warned that the moves would weaken the agency’s ability to effectively respond to natural disasters.
FEMA’s chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department that is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All this has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say.
The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for apparently mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
So again I am left wondering – Why? Why did those in government, especially the Bush Administration, fail to listen to a expert like this that was spelling out the problems, back in 2000?
In Part II, I will explore Mileti’s ideas for fixing some of these problems. Just a head’s up, it ain’t going to be any prettier for the Bush Administration.
Cross Posted at Six Degrees of Aaron.
