Why Disasters Occur?

Shortwave IR figure of Issac at 11:45 PM EST, 2 hours before making landfall in Haiti

Several years ago, a team of Howard University faculty members worked on a proposal (which did not get invited to the competition) on why disasters occur after the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  There are two  forces at work:  humans and nature.  I purposely did not put nature first because nature is always at work.  But a disaster can be though of as a combination of unsafe human conditions and the occurrence of a natural hazard.   Unsafe human conditions take on many forms - such as unsafe living conditions, like living in a tent when you are facing tropical storm force winds, or it can be that you are extremely poor and have not the means to run from the natural hazard, or you could be elderly, very young, disable and not have the ability to address the oncoming hazard.    The natural hazard could be a hurricane, floods, droughts or earthquake.  While we cannot predict Earthquakes, we can predict many of the other hazards.  So why is there a disconnect between protecting the vulnerable?????

The answer is simple:  Decisionmaking

So how does this happen??? In the boo,  At Risk:  Natural Hazards, people’s vulnerability and disaster by Wisner and co-authors (2005) the suggest the following set of items are possible:
 

(a) a group may fail to anticipate the event ; 

(b) they may fail to perceive the crisis the when it arrives; 

(c) they may fail to act after perceiving it; 

(d) they may try and still fail. 

As for Haiti and Tropical Cyclone Issac, clearly items A and B were at work. 
Lets address point A:"

Point A group may fail to anticipate the event, 
Who is in this group?? Forecasters, government decision-makers, individuals that may be impacted.

 While the Hurricane Center had properly forecast the tropical storm, there were issues with intensity and also track all week.  When Issac should have intensified it did not, when it have gone northwest it went west and even south at time.  But the uncertainty means that many people (governments, individuals)  do not act in a proper manner.
Listening to CNN in the tent cities, many people did not seem to know that a natural hazard was nearly upon them, so they stayed in the camps and did not go to evacuation sites.  This is a failure of  government side to communicate.  However, given that more than 400,000 persons are in camps I am not sure about the ability to safely house 25% of the people.   In addition, while the government is working on new housing, it is playing a dangerous game of chance and the entire international community should be helping to build stronger shelters 2 years after the Earthquake.

So late yesterday when Issac began to get organized, it also took on a more northerly direction, which would make a more direct hit on areas that were vulnerable.  Somehow this information never seemed to sink in.  Stronger wind along with higher rain rates increases your vulnerability.   The pressure had been falling steadily all day with TC Issac and then an eye-like feature began to form between 10-11 EST.  The eye-like feature made land-fall along the Haitian coast at 2 AM at that point these should have been further action.

What amazed me was that they do not evacuate in Haiti to shelters until the storm is upon them-- it is raining and the wind is blowing.  Extremely faulty thinking regardless of how many times you have had false alarms.  Public safety is not a question of how you will be perceived or if you are liked because of your action.  It is a responsibility.

Point B
 they may fail to perceive the crisis the when it arrives;

In this case, if your communication system is damaged or down for a period of time, you lose a sense of what is happening around you.  You are thinking about the areas that always flood, but you have a blind spot because you have not been in this situation before.  So you think on Cholera, flash flooding but what about compromised tents with objects flying around at 40-50 mphs.  How do you get to people in need, if power or cell phones are not working, it is dark, there is still heavy rain falling and roads are not passable?   While all scenarios cannot be worked, many of them can be. 

But there is one real issue:  Do you care about the vulnerable?  Are they an embarrassment to you because they are poor?  Have you put them in a box where their live and livelihoods are less important than yours?  This is not an a guilty judgement on anyone but no matter where I have been (US, Canada, Africa), those at the bottom of the created social scales are perceived as being less-- they have no voice, no face and are not heard.  In a world where race matters, these are often people of color (Black, Brown, tan, yellow, red) with poverty stamped on their forehead. 

I can't help to wonder why these situations play out over and over again in this World with so much wealth.  Deep down inside maybe we want to run away from being vulnerable and protect ourselves with material wealth.  Maybe, we are too busy with our own lives to do anything about it.  Maybe there are too many channels on TV with so little relevant content so that we are misinformed.  Maybe we don't understand the scale of disaster.  Maybe we don't want to be bothered.

I don't know the answer, but disasters are knocking on the door in a changing climate.  Wildfires, droughts, floods, Katrina type events are going to impact all of us at some point whether we are rich or poor.

Haiti, in recent years has been perceived as corrupt, violent, impoverished and poorly governed.   But that does no justice to courage/strength of the people that first broke the system of slavery and French ruler-ship.  The Haitian population will always be perceived in the Diaspora and African continent as the fore-runners of independence and the fight for human dignity.  There is a price to pay for such an action.   You can work out the math for yourself....

I hope that there are no injuries or fatalities from TC Issac in Haiti.  I pray that parents can protect their children from the howling wind and heavy rain, but this one has all of the ingredients of a disaster:  Human + natural hazard.