The Disaster Experts

Mastering Risk in Modern America

Scott Gabriel Knowles

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207996
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, many are asking what, if anything, can be done to prevent large-scale disasters. How is it that we know more about the hazards of modern American life than ever before, yet the nation faces ever-increasing losses from such events? History shows that disasters are not simply random acts. Where is the logic in creating an elaborate set of fire codes for buildings, and then allowing structures like the Twin Towers—tall, impressive, and risky—to go up as design experiments? Why prepare for terrorist attacks above all else when floods, fires, and earthquakes pose far more consistent threats to American life and prosperity? The Disaster Experts takes on these questions, offering historical context for understanding who the experts are that influence these decisions, how they became powerful, and why they are only slightly closer today than a decade ago to protecting the public from disasters. Tracing the intertwined development of disaster expertise, public policy, and urbanization over the past century, historian Scott Gabriel Knowles tells the fascinating story of how this diverse collection of professionals—insurance inspectors, engineers, scientists, journalists, public officials, civil defense planners, and emergency managers—emerged as the authorities on risk and disaster and, in the process, shaped modern America.

1

The Devil’s Privilege

Industrialism, the main creative force of the nineteenth century, produced the most degraded urban environment the world had yet seen. . . . Extraordinary changes of scale took place in the masses of buildings and the areas they covered; vast structures were erected almost overnight. Men built in haste, and had hardly time to repent of their mistakes before they tore down their original structures and built again, just as heedlessly. . . . It was a period of vast urban improvisation: makeshift hastily piled upon makeshift. . . . Every man was for himself; and the Devil, if he did not take the hindmost, at least reserved for himself the privilege of building the cities.

—Lewis Mumford

Disasters threatened and destroyed industrializing American cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a ferocity that challenged the notion of modernity itself as a sustainable urban condition. Chicago’s infamous 1871 fire leveled whole neighborhoods as well as the entire business district in a three-day blaze. Boston (1872) and Seattle (1889) fared only slightly better. Financial losses from fires in the United States were just under $75 million dollars in 1880 and had more than quadrupled to $330 million in 1920—with over $250 million lost in the 1904 Baltimore conflagration year alone, and $359 million lost in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire year.¹ The Iroquois Theater Fire (1903), breaking out in a Chicago building advertised as “fireproof,” took 602 lives in less than fifteen minutes; the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911) killed 146 immigrant textile workers, many of whom leaped out of windows to their deaths. Among the 20 deadliest fires in American history, 18 occurred between 1865 and 1945.² Though hurricanes and floods, earthquakes, and epidemic disease struck frequently, fire consumed lives and property with a regularity that truly marked this time in American history as a “Conflagration Era.”

Fire in industrializing America presented a threat encompassing every aspect of urban life, including the grave possibility of exterminating entire cities. Fire presented two complex and intertwined problems. First, fire risk was not equally allocated across the urban landscape; it was contingent on factors that changed from building to building, block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood. In the rapidly changing urban environment it was difficult to predict where the next fire might break out—to even begin to do so would require a massive effort toward understanding the science of fire and materials, construction history and vulnerabilities across the urban landscape, and comparative success of fire mitigation techniques from city to city. Second, a nuanced understanding of fire risk was not consistently fostered among city government officials, who might have exercised strong police powers in zoning and building code enforcement. Sporadic attempts to do so followed in the wake of major disasters like the 1871 Chicago Fire; but, such attempts were overcome time and again in every city by the daunting task of collecting the information necessary to standardize fire safety, and by the powerful interests of development. Elected officials found this situation risky to their political lives when disaster struck, but in most cases the risks of fire were tolerated in the nineteenth century by citizens with relatively low expectations of strong government action toward public safety, and high hopes for rapid construction and economic growth.

Before the Civil War private and volunteer firefighting companies proliferated in American cities, manned in many cases by firemen inspired to join by the neighborhood-level cultural appeals of ethnicity and race. By the latter part of the nineteenth century firefighting became too important to leave disorganized and chaotic, so cities took over this function and the fire service and its techniques became standardized and trusted. At this time fire departments and small building inspection departments comprised the sum total of publicly available knowledge about, and authority over, fire risk. Municipal water and fire alarm telegraph systems incrementally made the fire service more effective, but the overall situation was still a reactive and mostly passive government response to fire at a time of steadily heightening risk. In this risky environment heroic firemen were apparently expected to save the industrial city from itself. And when the firemen failed, as they inevitably would against unsafe high rise office buildings and theaters, factories and tenements, the public would just have to accept destruction by fire as a constant of the urban experience.³

The specter of fire in the Conflagration Era exposed a conflict at the heart of industrialization, a condition of “reflexive modernity” explained by sociologist Ulrich Beck in which the exact processes making the industrial metropolis possible also manufactured a startlingly high level of risk. The technological and financial achievements of the industrial age brought with them a corresponding emphasis on standard setting, performance, and invention. Delivering high performance and reliability from technological systems sat at the center of new claims to authority from technically minded elites in American cities.⁴ And yet it was this very same cadre of industrial entrepreneurs and managers, engineers, scientists, and financiers bringing about the changes that were making cities increasingly likely to burn. One group of experts among them was acutely aware of this paradox. Threatened consistently with massive losses and bankruptcies the fire insurance industry took on the twin challenges of fire: understanding it, and bringing about the reforms necessary to prevent it.

From the 1860s forward, an emerging vanguard of fire experts, many of them connected with the fire insurance industry, worked to influence the built city through creation and dissemination of knowledge about fire risks and disasters. Some objective basis on which to define safety was badly needed for the fire insurance industry to set profitable rates for coverage—not an easy task in hodgepodge cities full of wood and machinery jammed next to steel and glass, and with no standard approaches to municipal government control over fire risk. Generalization and abstraction, with so many technical and regulatory variations, were not easy to accomplish. However, valuable knowledge about fire risks was being created on the job by the fire insurance experts, and as knowledge expanded, fires and conditions causing them began to fall into what observers believed were discernible patterns. This led to new efforts to influence the built environment through both market pressure in the form of higher rates and public policy pressure in the form of more stringent building and fire codes. With both strategies progressing in fits and starts throughout the late nineteenth century, the insurance industry also created novel nonprofit organizations geared toward understanding fire risk systematically and scientifically, and disseminating the knowledge widely. When their work veered toward the theoretical they found willing collaborators in university science and engineering departments. When their work pitched toward the applied, they found partners in the fire service, the architecture and city planning professions, and among muckraking journalists and consumer advocates.

A fire disaster expert network expanded its knowledge and authority in the United States in the late nineteenth century, rooted in the activities of two different segments of the fire insurance industry. One was the National Board of Fire Underwriters (NBFU), a collection of companies that had grown frantic after the Civil War at the prospect of keeping up with increasing urban fire risks. A second industry organization, the Associated Factory Mutual Fire Insurance Companies (Factory Mutuals), had for decades before the Civil War been championing fire safety in the design and maintenance of factories in New England. The Factory Mutuals and NBFU over time came to collaborate in the name of fire protection and the profitability it made possible. Despite their accomplishments in information-gathering and risk analysis, at the height of the period of industrialization—a moment marked by the deification of electricity in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—the risks continued to aggregate. The disaster experts saw themselves behind the pace of urban change no matter how fast they worked. In the midst of this uncertainty, the introduction of laboratory testing methods in order to quantify and rate electrical and structural materials marked a new approach to the broad goal of achieving urban fire safety, one that found immediate legitimacy through its reliance on scientific and engineering practice that elevated it above mounting criticism of big business in the late nineteenth century. In the pioneering work of William H. Merrill, founder of Underwriters Laboratories (UL) in Chicago, we see the invention of fire safety moving to the laboratory. This held implications not only for the growth of knowledge about fire safety but also the ability of the fire insurance industry to work toward preventing or at least mitigating fires in a climate of reactionary and sporadic government attention to fire risk. By the end of the nineteenth century it was possible for the fire experts to collect what had been learned over the previous decades, codify it, and teach it, signified by the innovative “fire protection engineering” program taught at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology. In each of these ways the explosion of risk in the Conflagration Era prompted an emerging cadre of disaster experts to ask new questions and develop new techniques with which they hoped to revoke the “Devil’s privilege” in the American city.

The National Board of Fire Underwriters

There is no better way to map the landscapes of risk in industrializing America than to chart the history of the fire insurance industry.⁵ Fire insurance in the United States is traceable back to the colonial period, but in general municipal governments and lenders did not require property owners to purchase it. Many fire insurance customers were, as might be expected, merchants who stood to lose their businesses if docks and warehouses went up in flames. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin helped found an insurance company that provided protection for homeowners, tied to an integrated firefighting-insurance connection followed also by some European cities. Experimentation and variability in municipal firefighting capabilities and insurance requirements marked American urbanization until the twentieth century.⁶

The fire insurance industry was (and is) divided into two general types: stock companies and mutuals. Stock companies make up the larger share of the industry, and are marked by a profit-based model, dependent on writing policies and collecting premiums that surpass losses paid out to policyholders. The stock companies are often publicly traded (hence the term “stock”). Stock companies derive much of their profitability from returns on investments made with the premiums collected. Mutuals are often cooperatively or privately owned and reflect the interests of a particular class of risks, usually large-scale industrial risks. Mutual policyholders have traditionally been more willing to adopt fireproofing technologies in exchange for lower premiums and have been interested in insurance policies less as investment instruments than as more specific methods of risk mitigation.

In 1866, after staggering fire losses at the end of the Civil War, stock fire insurance companies banded together into a nationwide organization, the National Board of Fire Underwriters (NBFU).⁷ Previously, individual companies and local associations operated largely without sharing information about rate-setting techniques and standards for coverage. The NBFU emerged as an instrument through which to try to bring standards and order to a geographically dispersed industry. The founding goals of the NBFU included provisions for establishment of uniform rates and premiums and payment of agents, arson reduction, and promotion of the value of insurance for both businesses and individual consumers.⁸ Small and isolated fires could even be good for business by encouraging customers to take out policies and governments to require coverage. But in order to profit by risk, the NBFU had to begin to measure, calculate, and attempt to control the largest fire disasters.

To “establish and maintain . . . a system of uniform rates of premiums . . . and maintain a uniform rate of compensation to agents and brokers” were the NBFU’s first two founding principles.⁹ Both indicate a desire for price standardization across the industry—a need that required a hitherto unrealized level of statistical knowledge about insured and potentially insurable structures. A clear goal was comprehensive, timely, accurate information.¹⁰ If fires were perceived as inevitable (and necessary to business), the most profitable way to run insurance companies involved knowing what sorts of buildings are most likely to burn, and charging premiums that reflected the accurate level of danger by region or city and by class of structure. By sharing information from around the country, individual underwriters would now be able to see a more comprehensive map of dangers than was ever before possible.

In good times fire insurance companies might stray from organizational cohesion and information sharing, but the NBFU’s work took on new urgency after the Chicago Fire of 1871.¹¹ The Chicago Fire—still the most storied in American history—killed as many as 300 people, rendered 90,000 homeless, and left a “Burnt District” four miles long and roughly three-quarters of a mile wide; damages totaled 200 million dollars, and almost every fire insurer doing business in the city failed, leaving the industry demoralized and policyholders stranded.¹² Coming as it did in the midst of an election season, the conflagration turned fireproofing and building standards into a political issue, with a “Fire Proof Party” taking most of the seats on the Board of Aldermen with its pledge to rebuild Chicago as a fireproof city.

As historian Christine Meisner Rosen explains, difficulties emerged immediately after the election around the exact nature of the legislation needed to end the conflagration risk. Fire Proof Party officials and many middle- and upper-income Chicagoans, along with the downtown business community, advocated a total ban on wooden frame construction in the city. Working-class, mostly immigrant Chicagoans pushed back against the ban, fearing the high costs of building brick homes. Protests and debate animated a season in which compromise finally emerged in the form of a “comprehensive ordinance” establishing a sizable inner urban zone where wooden frame construction was banned and risky industries like explosives manufacturing and planing mills were prohibited. Wooden construction was permitted in the outer zones. Such an approach was far-sighted, as it addressed individual property-owners’ responsibilities as well as introducing a zoning concept of planning at a larger scale to define and spatially organize acceptable and unacceptable land uses. While building and fire codes stretched back to the founding of American cities, zoning for risk mitigation was not yet standard practice.¹³

The new fire ordinance in Chi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Devil’s Privilege
• 2 Reforming Fire
• 3 The Invisible Screen of Safety
• 4 Ten to Twenty Million Killed, Tops
• 5 What Is a Disaster?
• 6 A Nation of Hazards
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments