Crisis, Disaster and Risk

Institutional Response and Emergence

Kyle Farmbry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317473596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book explores the interactions of theories of risk with natural disasters, health crises, and crises in the areas of science and technology. Using organizational frameworks developed exclusively by the author, it provides a series of best practices and lessons related to each of the emergency and crisis situations covered. These lessons will assist students and practitioners, engaged in learning about and reacting to crises, to better respond to them. The mass protests that erupted in China during the spring of 1989 were not confined to Beijing and Shanghai. Cities and towns across the great breadth of China were engulfed by demonstrations, which differed regionally in content and tone: the complaints and protest actions in prosperous Fuijan Province on the south China coast were somewhat different from those in Manchuria or inland Xi'an or the country towns of Hunan. The variety of the reactions is a barometer of the political and economic climate in contemporary China. In this book, Western China specialists who were on the spot that spring describe and analyze the upsurges of protest that erupted around them.

Part I Natural Disasters as Crisis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315705354-1

Common belief would have it that nothing about Chicago’s geography links it to earthquakes. However, the tremors that shook the city on the morning of April 18, 2008, proved that earthquakes can strike in unexpected places. As stories of the quake’s impact began to circulate, people heard of the mild shaking of towers in downtown Chicago and much heavier trembling in some of the nearby towns. Calls poured into fire departments with reports of the tremor. People in several of the city’s high-rises shared stories of the swaying of buildings and of being awakened by the jolts that occurred at about a quarter to five that morning.

This was not the first time that Chicago had been stricken by a quake. Nearly two hundred years earlier, between December 16, 1811, and February 7, 1812, Chicago and much of the Midwest felt a series of violent tremors that stemmed from under New Madrid, Missouri, a small town about 167 miles from St. Louis and known to be sitting at the center of thousands of fault lines that stretch across nearly a quarter of a million square miles of territory throughout the central United States. The tremor sequence in 1811 and 1812, which is now referred to as the New Madrid Sequence, was felt as far away as Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, and South Carolina. Eliza Brian, a witness to the sequence, noted:

On the l6th of December, 1811, about two o’clock, A.M. we were visited by a violent shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating, which was followed in a few minutes by the complete saturation of the atmosphere, with sulfurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro, not knowing where to go, or what to do—the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species—the cracking of trees falling, and the roaring of the Mississippi—the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, it is supposed to an irruption in its bed—formed a scene truly horrible. From that time, until about sunrise, a number of lighter shocks occurred; at which time one still more violent than the first took place, with the same accompaniments as the first, and the terror which had been excited in every one, and indeed in all animal nature, was now, if possible, doubled. (Dow 1849, 155)

Geological estimates place the number of earthquakes linked to the 1812 New Madrid quake sequence in the tens of thousands. Most of these were small and detectable by only the most sensitive instruments. Geologists also now estimate that the New Madrid fault lines experience major earthquakes every three to four hundred years. This cycle is a point of concern for experts who follow earthquakes closely, as these estimates would place the regions impacted by the New Madrid fault lines due for another major earthquake sometime near the end of the twenty-first century.

Current population densities of the major areas where the New Madrid fault lines reach and the areas where the quakes of 1811 were felt provide a basis of concern for risk assessors engaged with predicting future quake possibilities. With a current population of almost three million people, Chicago for example would face enormous consequences if it were to find itself confronted today by an earthquake on the scale of New Madrid. New Orleans or Montreal, with populations of more than 250,000 and 1.6 million respectively, would not fare much better.

Understanding both what happened as a result of the New Madrid sequence in the 1800s and the implications for today’s seismological considerations is a small part of the conversation on earthquakes and the broader questions surrounding them. Underscoring each of our incidents with an earthquake is a critical bit of science related to much of the quake’s cause. Fault lines, continental drift, and the frailty of the earth’s crust provide much of the geological story underpinning the damage caused by earthquakes. However, critical questions related to the built environment, as well as the quality of structures, factor into discussions. Weakly built structures in areas of high seismic activity will often lead to dangerous situations for people in the structures. Large numbers of these structures, situated in rapidly growing cities, will lead to greater risks of harm for greater numbers of people.

The chapters in this section explore cases of natural disaster many of which raise a critical question of whether there is indeed such a thing as a natural disaster. Factors of human choice provide a critical role in the selection of locations, the economic factors, and some of the political issues that underscore some of the disasters we have come to acknowledge.

I begin with a comparative examination of tsunamis. My comparison assumes a historical framework, as I examine the Lisbon tsunami of 1755 and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. With both disasters, I review conceptualizations of optimism and human control to further establish themes that surface in other crises examined throughout the book. In Lisbon, optimism became a critical means by which people made sense of a disaster or crisis. For some people, incidents such as the tsunami of 1755 were perceived as merely a manifestation of God’s will, regardless of the loss caused. Others used the incident to begin to critically reflect on humankind’s role in shaping our own destinies. As a result of the second response, more critically inquisitive people began to explore questions, both in the context of the Lisbon tsunami and in the case of other disasters or crises experienced, that allowed for rapid scientific and medical advances that helped launch people on paths toward a modern state. In 2004, optimism of late modernity, which was driven largely through an appreciation of our advances in science, enabled people to find themselves lulled into a state of believing that we could predict or control various disasters. Unexpected crises such as the tsunami that struck nations surrounding the Indian Ocean in December of that year forced us to rethink how we conceptualized our abilities of prediction and control.

I continue with an examination of earthquakes and the societal changes that have stemmed from them. Before a crisis such as an earthquake, life exists in a certain way. Then, a sudden change occurs in the form of a major seismic happening, and life as it was known is forever altered. However, behind the incidents of various earthquakes are matters of human choice. In the aftermath of one of the central quakes examined—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—vital decisions were made regarding how to rebuild the city and how to present the decisions to rebuild.

I conclude this section with an examination of hurricanes, intertwined with the choices people make to live in certain regions that are more vulnerable to such events. I begin the chapter with an examination of the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas, where one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history flooded the city and took the lives of over six thousand of its residents. To this day, the Galveston hurricane retains the position of being the disaster that is responsible for claiming the most lives in U.S. history. Galveston brought about a number of questions related to disaster and geography. The city was situated on an island at sea level in a zone where hurricanes had been known to strike. Yet people continued to move there. Galveston also brought up questions related to rebuilding after a disaster. Clear policy choices were made by city officials to alter the built environment of the city—to the extent of raising land and building seawalls as means of protection measures against future hurricanes.

In the decades following Galveston, there were numerous questions related to whether or not we could effectively plan for and, to a degree, control the various elements that confronted our cities and towns. We would over the years encounter hurricanes of various scales of intensity, whose destructiveness often was the result of both hurricane force and the evolution of years of public policy that impacted the decisions people made about where to live. I end with 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, an event that served as a catalyst in framing discussions not only on a crisis, but also on the deeper dynamics of historical legacy, environmental complexity, and economic disparity in a region susceptible to disaster.

Ultimately, my goal in this section is to explore the interaction between risk and disasters with a particular eye toward exploring issues of choice and response to the inevitable occurrence of disasters that, if not truly natural, have nature as a vital component. There are, as will be explained in the pages that follow, disasters that have critical elements that are intertwined with a multitude of human choices. In examining these disasters, we must take into consideration the role of human activity and choice in relation to these events’ impact on human lives.

1 Optimism Interrogated The Earthquakes and Tsunamis of 1755 and 2004

DOI: 10.4324/9781315705354-2

Nearly a quarter of a millennium separates two of the worst disasters that have confronted humankind: the 1755 earthquake and tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean and the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The timing of the disasters places them at opposing ends of the modern era of human development—an era characterized by our confidence in human ability to predict and control the happenings in the world.

Our entrance into and emergence from an era of modernity were shaped by shifting interpretations of optimism, which in turn affected how we responded to the disasters and crises we encountered. The 1755 earthquake and tsunami fell during a time when philosophers were beginning to wrestle with questions related to humankind’s role in society. Central to many of their questions was the problem of how to integrate occurrences of human suffering into our understanding of the broader world. By 1755, Europe had endured periods of war, famine, and plague. For many people such occurrences provided cause for questioning how such tragedies fit into a broader vision God had for the world. For some, these questions were answered with a simple degree of faith in a notion that all things that happen to humankind—both good and bad—should be accepted as a reflection of benevolent will. Others, however, began to use the occurrence of these tragedies as part of a process for exploring our human potential to shape the world around us.

Two hundred and fifty years later, in December 2004, another earthquake and tsunami forced the world to reflect on another form of optimism. This latter form was grounded in beliefs of humankind’s abilities to predict and prepare for any crisis encountered. The world had, according to this perspective, developed institutional and technological capabilities to aptly address many of the challenges that the world might confront. Through advances in science and economics, we could find ways to solve any problem, both foreseen and unforeseen, that we might encounter.

Both periods provide valuable lessons in how disasters are conceptualized and, ultimately, how responses to disasters are generated. A comparison of the periods helps us to explore how people in the stages of early modernity and people in the stages of late modernity might look to institutions to help address crises. In the case of the 1755 tsunami in Lisbon, for example, the nation-state was gaining relevancy over the Church as the central institution in society. As such, it was becoming perceived as the entity best positioned to wrestle with the challenges of disaster. In contrast, by the time of the 2004 tsunami, weaknesses of the nation-state in its ability to respond to crises were emerging. In the place of the nation-state were various nongovernmental institutions and nonstate actors that were becoming increasingly positioned to respond to crisis.

Each period also gave rise to notions of mutual assistance between nations and people living in them. In the 1755 earthquake and tsunami, the international response provided an early instance in which nation-states helped one another in addressing a crisis. At a time of intense competition between world powers for the positions of dominance in expanding colonial empires, a willingness to provide assistance to a competitor nation was a new phenomenon. In 2004, the global community engaged in cooperative relief efforts to a much greater extent than the world had witnessed before. These new dimensions of giving ultimately altered global expectations of how people’s generosity might be drawn upon during a crisis.

I begin this chapter with an examination of concepts of optimism in Europe in the 1700s and link them to the 1755 earthquake and tsunami. I then examine the rebuilding and relief processes of the 1755 earthquake. I continue with an examination of factors of optimism as they emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on the development of systems of prediction and perceived control. I conclude by linking much later notions of optimism to the tragedy of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.

A comparison of these disasters provides a lens through which we can begin to examine other disasters and some of the shifts in thought that accompany them. We can explore frameworks of optimism that might exist and how they are contextualized at a given time. We can learn how such notions of optimism might be considered in light of possible disasters that populations in various parts of the globe may encounter.

Optimism in Europe

During the 1700s, an emergent concept within European Enlightenment circles was the notion of optimism. This belief held that God had a plan for all of humankind, and regardless of whatever catastrophes humankind might face, everything was both part of a larger plan and, regardless of the suffering it might cause, was meant to be good.

Central in the promotion of this concept were writers Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, and Voltaire. In his 1710 work Theodicy, Leibniz argued that all the imperfections of the world, including those that might seemingly cause harm, are part of God’s plan. Alexander Pope, in his 1734 poem An Essay on Man, built on Leibniz’s notions and suggested that since it is impossible for people to know all that underlies God’s intentions, we need to merely accept that at the basis of all of God’s intentions is a notion of good. Voltaire’s perspective was best articulated in his 1733 Letters Concerning the English Nation, where he wrote that mankind should “thank the author of nature for informing us with that instinct which is forever directing us to futurity” (Voltaire 1741, 224). By assuming this approach to thinking about the gratitude that humankind should show God for granting us the mere ability to think about and aim for future goals, he acknowledged that it is important to accept the good and the bad that we might encounter.

By the late 1750s, however, Voltaire found himself in a position of criticizing the various proponents of optimism. Specifically, he found himself questioning the belief that it would be possible to merely accept the challenges that humankind encounters in the worst of catastrophes as simply a component of a divine plan. Much of the source for this level of criticism arose with Voltaire’s struggle to make sense of the earthquake and tsunami of 1755.

Portugal, 1755: An Early-Modern Disaster

Portugal, like many other nations in the 1700s, was in the midst of determining its role in the broader European framework. The nation had begun establishing colonial interests in many of the corners of the world and was beginning to explore means of further exploiting much of the wealth that it was accumulating. Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, was particularly known for its opulence, as much of the wealth generated from many of the Portuguese colonies in the Americas would end up in that city. Such wealth was, however, beginning to place Lisbon at odds with other nations of Europe, which were beginning to experience an increasing sense of competition with the Portuguese capital. It was also causing tension between the capital and many of the rural areas in Portugal that did not share in the capital’s wealth.

Lisbon was also known as a city both steeped in Catholicism and still untouched by many of the Protestant reforms racing through much of the rest of Europe in the mid-1700s. To many people in the other cities in Europe, Lisbon was viewed as being permeated with Inquisition-era rituals, where the link between Christianity and idol worship had not been completely severed. As a r...