When drought and a killer heat wave struck the United States in 1999, President Clinton took typical government action—a proclamation and a task force: "We've worked hard to help the victims of the drought and the heat wave. But as weather disruptions become even more common, and they will, they will demand a more coordinated response by the national government. So today I'm directing that the White House immediately convene a task force of the relevant cabinet agencies to coordinate our efforts and focus our attack on this problem."
That looks like just another soundbite. But one part of it was very significant: the President's saying that "weather disruptions . . . will become even more common" in the future. Clinton was echoing the latest wisdom from the scientists who study natural hazards—American civilization grows more vulnerable to natural disasters.
Why Natural Disasters Are Growing
On average, Americans lose a billion dollars a week to a variety of natural hazards. Earthquakes, fires, storms, and flooding are dramatic; drought is slow and quiet. Lightning is instant death for individuals; heat waves oppress whole regions for weeks on end. But all of these hazards do their damage because civilization insists on standing in their way, according to Disasters By Design, a book from the National Academy Press. "Human beings, not nature, are the cause of disaster losses," says the author, Dennis Mileti. "The choices that are made about where and how human development will proceed actually determine the losses that will be suffered in future disasters."
Our warning systems, building codes, and other measures succeed only in saving lives. Consider the case of hurricanes: they no longer kill many people, but they still cause record-breaking economic losses every year. That's what the President was talking about—even the small ones cost more these days. Hurricanes haven't changed, but we have.
Or consider two recent earthquakes. The Turkish quake of 2002 killed several tens of thousands of people, while the Kobe quake of 1995, only slightly smaller, had a death toll of about 5,000. Better construction practices made that difference. Yet the costs of such events, in dollars and disruption, are still staggering. So while the Northridge earthquake of January 1994 killed only a few dozen, for instance, it caused more than $20 billion in insured damages. Surely we can do better. Disasters By Design, a study funded by the National Science Foundation, talks about ways to start.
Mitigation of Disaster
The NSF has done this before. When it funded the nation's first broad-based study of natural hazards in 1975, the undertaking was fruitful: insights shared among geologists, lawmakers, meteorologists, insurers, planners, emergency providers, social scientists and other specialists paved the way for a remarkable record of saving lives. The "hazards community" that took shape in the 1970s has learned much about resisting and responding to disasters. Thanks to an emphasis on mitigation—softening the blows of natural forces—the number of deaths from these events has dropped persistently during the last 20 years.
But the measures we take are still incomplete. For example, the hurricane warning system makes people feel safer, but now it's harder to keep them from building on the beach. And in earthquake country, new structures preserve people's lives, but the growing population is still vulnerable, living too far from jobs and served by elaborate electrical and water systems. People die less and less, but they keep paying more and more.
Toward Sustainability
In 1994 the NSF commissioned another disaster study to explore how to go beyond mitigation toward a more resilient way of life, one that rolls with nature's punches and returns to normalcy quickly. Under the name "sustainable hazard mitigation," that vision is the central concept of "Disasters By Design."
The first two chapters flesh out what sustainable hazard mitigation means. Chapter 1 puts it in familiar terms, if "sustainability" is in your vocabulary. It means living politically the way we live personally, in ways our descendants won't end up paying for.
Chapter 2 brings the concept to life with specific scenarios for real cities. One involves a severe flood in Boulder, Colorado, that tests the current system of culverts and greenbelts and arouses the citizens to improve their readiness for the next flood. Another scenario involves San Francisco, which undertakes a deep civic makeover, knowing that the next great earthquake there is inevitable. Both cities gain benefits beyond the insurance their new policies provide—the people and their institutions are stronger, and wealthier too.
Once those stories fire your appetite to try something like that where you live, there is plenty of hard information in the rest of the book, aimed at nonspecialists. I have little doubt that President Clinton learned from Disasters By Design, and if you're looking for what to do beyond stockpiling water and batteries, you'll take inspiration from it too. Dennis Mileti told me not long ago that this was the National Acadamy's most popular title. It was out of print for a while, but is available again in hard copy and PDF.
PS: To dig deeper into disaster research, you might start with the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. There, among other things, you can read the Disaster Research newsletter or the excellent peer-reviewed journal Natural Hazards Informer, with lucid articles about flood-control planning and earthquake education.
