Disasters

A Sociological Approach

Kathleen Tierney

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Disasters kill, maim, and generate increasingly large economic losses. But they do not wreak their damage equally across populations, and every disaster has social dimensions at its very core. This important book sheds light on the social conditions and on the global, national, and local processes that produce disasters.

Topics covered include the social roots of disaster vulnerability, exposure to natural hazards such as hurricanes and tsunamis as a form of environmental injustice, and emerging threats. Written by a leading expert in the field, this book provides the necessary frameworks for understanding hazards and disasters, exploring the contributions of very different social science fields to disaster research and showing how these ideas have evolved over time. Bringing the social aspects of recent devastating disasters to the forefront, Tierney discusses the challenges of conducting research in the aftermath of disasters and critiques the concept of disaster resilience, which has come to be seen as a key to disaster risk reduction.

Peppered with case studies, research examples, and insights from very different disciplines, this rich introduction is an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in the social nature of disasters and their relation to broader social forces.

1
The Social Significance of Disasters

Introduction

Disasters are a frequent occurrence across the globe and, despite organized efforts to reduce disaster losses, those losses continue to grow. Between 1996 and 2005, an estimated 1.5 million people were killed in disasters worldwide, and many more were affected by injuries, disaster-related illness, homelessness, and economic loss. Deaths and injuries are more common in low- and middle-income countries by several orders of magnitude, while economic losses are significantly higher in wealthier nations (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) 2016). According to studies carried out by Munich Reinsurance, worldwide disaster losses for 2017 totaled $330 billion, only half of that amount being covered by insurance. A significant share of those losses is attributable to three major hurricanes that struck the United States in 2017—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—making 2017 the second-highest year for overall losses, after 2011, when losses amounted to approximately $354 billion in current dollars.

In addition to causing deaths, injuries, and economic losses, disasters have other profound social impacts that we will explore in this volume. According to a recent report by the World Bank Group (2017), disasters are a key factor in driving people into poverty and keeping them there. Disasters can lead to short- and long(er)-term mental health problems as well as to threats to physical health. Experiencing a disaster can be a major stressor for households and business owners. The extensive damage and disruption that disasters cause can result in the breakup of neighborhoods and in the loss of significant sources of social support for disaster survivors, some of whom may never be able to return to their homes, while others will never recover from these experiences. Many who survive disaster may find themselves living in temporary accommodations for months or even years, their daily routines disrupted and their plans for recovery stalled. After disasters, children’s development may suffer as a result of interruptions in schooling, residential dislocation, and parental stress.

Key societal institutions also experience difficulties in the aftermath of disasters, as schools, churches, charitable organizations, and agencies that provide health and welfare services see their burdens increase. Communities face challenges associated with the disruption and restoration of key lifelines such as water, electrical power, transportation, and other critical infrastructure systems. Local jurisdictions may experience population decline and tax losses. A disaster is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most communities, and they often struggle to understand what they need to do to respond and recover.

Large economies, such as those of the United States and other developed countries, experience temporary economic setbacks in the aftermath of disasters, but there is little evidence to date that disasters cause significant economic downturns in more developed nations. However, this is not the case for smaller, less developed countries; in those cases, disasters can have significant economic impacts, particularly when they affect key sectors of those economies. For a nation seeking to improve its level of economic development, a disaster can be a major setback. In both large and small countries, the need to respond to and recover from disasters drains financial resources that could otherwise be employed more productively. In the United States, as billion- and multibillion-dollar disasters continue to occur with alarming frequency, taxpayers, insurance companies, and disaster survivors themselves are forced to foot the bill. For households and businesses, disasters can result in increased debt and an inability to take advantage of opportunities for financial advancement. In many instances, particularly of catastrophic and near-catastrophic disasters, it can take years or even decades for social and economic recovery to take place, as communities, families, and businesses struggle to cope over the long term.

As we will see throughout this volume, disaster impacts and losses are not random, nor are the burdens of disasters borne equally by all members of affected populations. Rather, the impacts of disasters often fall most heavily on those who are most vulnerable: the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups. Many current inquiries in the sociological study of disasters center on how various axes of inequality such as class, race, gender, and other aspects of social stratification contribute to shaping the patterns of disaster victimization and recovery.

Media attention typically focuses on the immediate impacts of disasters and fades away in days or weeks. As a result, the public is generally unaware of the cascading effects of disasters and of the struggles that survivors endure over time. In Hurricane Harvey in 2017, floodwaters surged over many facilities that contained toxins, such as landfills and agricultural and petrochemical plants. Those waters, too, contained biological hazards, for example fecal matter, E. coli bacteria, shigella, and even Vibrio vulnificus, a deadly bacterium. When Hurricane Maria struck the US territory of Puerto Rico that same year, the island’s electric power infrastructure was essentially destroyed. Among other impacts, the loss of power threatened the lives of those who were dependent on kidney dialysis treatments and on medical devices that required a supply of electricity. Wildfires denude landscapes and set the stage for flooding and landslides later, when it rains, as happened for example in 2017, when major fires in central California were followed by deadly debris flows. After the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Nepalese troops providing relief under the auspices of the United Nations brought cholera to the island. As of 2016, an estimated 770,000 people, or about 8 percent of the population, have been infected with cholera and over 9,000 people have died—and those numbers are thought to be underestimates (Knox 2016). In 2011 in Japan, when the Great Tohoku earthquake triggered a deadly tsunami that caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the media covered that sensational story, but now there is little coverage of the ongoing effects of the large-scale population displacement and long-term nuclear contamination that this massive disaster caused.

Also neglected are the ways in which hazards and disasters can erode the sense of community and the sense of place, and also lead to conflict among those who are affected. Disasters can result in the loss of important cultural assets, as happens for example when historic structures are destroyed and traditional livelihoods are disrupted. Decades ago sociologist Kai Erikson (1976) showed how a flash flood that occurred in 1972 in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia as a result of negligence on the part of a coal company that failed to maintain a dam effectively destroyed community cohesion and triggered widespread mental health problems in the affected communities. In a subsequent book entitled A New Species of Trouble, Erikson (1995) documented how technological disasters and toxic threats can cause collective trauma for Native Americans and other disadvantaged groups. As the title suggests, technological advances achieved in contemporary societies have a dark side, which manifests itself in the form of heretofore unacknowledged hazards. Other research illustrates how such threats and the lawsuits they often engender can lead to the formation of contentious factions and to decline in social connectedness and trust.

Disasters can also provoke challenges to the legitimacy and competence of governments and institutions. In one historic example, the dictatorial government of Nicaragua appropriated and mishandled international aid after the 1972 Managua earthquake and subsequently fell from power seven years later, largely as a result of public indignation. The 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which originated in China, created a legitimacy crisis for the ruling Communist Party, which had attempted to cover up the outbreak even as it spread worldwide. In 2005 the response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe was so inexcusably inept that it permanently tarnished the record of the Bush administration. In the aftermath of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy, six scientists and one public official were found guilty of manslaughter for not adequately informing the public, in the days leading up to the disaster, about the impending danger—an episode that bears evidence of the eroding confidence in science and government in the face of disaster. Governments that depend on international aid in order to respond to and recover from disasters may find their countries overrun and their authority bypassed by outside entities that pursue their donors’ interests rather than the needs of disaster victims. The provision of large amounts of disaster aid also tends to breed and feed corruption, particularly in already corrupt societies, and this leads to public distrust and disillusionment.

The impacts of disasters, and in many cases their likelihood, are amplified by ongoing global trends. Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization and intensified development in hazardous areas put ever larger populations at risk. The proliferation of global supply chains means that disasters that affect suppliers in one country have ramifications for businesses in distant nations. Climate change leads to ocean warming and sea-level rise, which in turn result in more extreme atmospheric events and greater impacts from those events in coastal areas. As climate change progresses, societies around the world will be forced to grapple with more frequent heat waves, the spread of infectious disease agents, land loss in coastal areas, and a host of other climate change-induced effects.

Given the societal significance of disasters, it is not difficult to see why sociologists and other social scientists find these events and the efforts to reduce their impacts endlessly fascinating. As we have already seen, disasters have economic, political and policy, health and mental health dimensions. They frequently bring to the fore issues of inequality and social justice, shining a light on the problems experienced by marginalized and vulnerable populations. At the same time, social behavior in disasters also reveals the human capacity for altruism and creativity. We will explore together these and other themes in the chapters that follow.

Key Concepts and Definitions in the Study of Disasters

To ensure that we are working from a common set of definitions in the discussion that follow, in this section I introduce concepts that are commonly used in the sociological study of disasters and that will be employed in later chapters. Obviously one key concept is the idea of disaster itself. An important takeaway point is that disasters are by their nature social events, not merely physical ones. If a major volcanic eruption were to occur in an area where human settlements did not exist or remained unaffected, that eruption would be a significant geophysical event, but not a disaster. In keeping with sociological conceptualizations, disasters involve the juxtaposition of physical forces—geological, atmospheric, technological, and other forces—and vulnerable human communities. The severity of a disaster is measured not by the magnitude of the physical forces involved, but rather by the magnitude of its societal impacts.

As subsequent discussions will show, disasters were previously seen as discrete events, concentrated in time and space, that disrupt the social order and interfere with the ability of a community or society to continue to operate, for example by interfering with governmental functions, economic activities, utility services, education, transportation, telecommunications, and housing. While acknowledging such impacts, more recent social science formulations see disasters as arising not so much from the physical forces that trigger them at specific times as from longer-term global and societal processes, which in turn result in an increase of the potential for loss. Much of the discussion that follows will focus on those processes, making the point that the potential for disasters and disaster victimization builds up over long time periods.

Table 1.1 How emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes differ.

SOURCE: Compiled from data in Quarantelli 1996 and Tierney 2008.

Emergencies	Disasters	Catastrophes
Impacts localized	Impacts widespread, severe	Devastating physical and societal impacts
Response mainly local	Response is multi-jurisdictional, intergovernmental, but typically bottom-up	Response is initiated by central government because localities and regions are devastated
Standard operating procedures sufficient to handle event	Response requires activation of disaster plans; significant challenges emerge	Response ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1 The Social Significance of Disasters
• 2 Disaster Research in Historical Context: Early Insights and Recent Trends
• 3 Sociological Research on Disasters: Key Contributions from Other Disciplines
• 4 Theoretical Approaches and Perspectives in the Study of Hazards and Disasters
• 5 Confronting Disaster Research Challenges
• 6 Disaster Vulnerability
• 7 Disaster Resilience: Concepts, Measures, and Critiques
• 8 What the Future Holds: Greater Risks and Impacts or Greater Coping Capacity?
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement