Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I’ve been thinking about why it is we are so obsessed with predicting disasters—over and above preventing them. What is so magical about a forecast? The answer may have something to do with the way the brain is wired. The brain loathes uncertainty. It’s a survival skill, except when it isn’t. We like patterns, which helps explain why we like music and storytelling. But we fear things we can’t predict. So we read horoscopes or watch CNBC—or sell all of our stocks when the market is low—just to stop the itch of the unknown.

In 1990, a scientist named Dr. Iben Browning predicted that the Missouri
town of New Madrid had a 50-50 chance of having a major quake on or around
Dec. 3. As the date approached, The Commercial Appeal began running a daily
“Quake Watch” series. Reporters camped out in the tiny town. Schools closed and supermarkets ran out of candles. The date arrived and nothing happened.
Browning died, his reputation in tatters, the next year.

It’s time to resist the seduction of the prediction, just as we resist our
brain’s other bad ideas. It distracts us from the real work we need to do.
Disasters happen every year, more or less on time. The true test of a
civilization is whether we take every reasonable precaution ahead of time.
As the futurist Joel Barker once said, “The ultimate function of prophecy
is not to tell the future, but to make it.”

Last week’s magnitude 6.3 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, triggered a flurry of earnest but confused conversations around the world. Why, TV reporters asked the experts, can’t we predict earthquakes by now? And the scientists humbly explained, as they do after every earthquake, that it remains impossible to know exactly when and where the earth’s plates will slip. Despite millions of dollars and decades of research, it’s very hard to do.

Then came alarming news: an Italian scientist did indeed predict last
Monday’s quake, it turns out! But no one listened to him. Gioacchino
Giuliani had predicted that a quake would strike a town more than 50 km
south of L’Aquila—several days earlier. He based his forecast on an
increase in emissions of radon gas in the area, a theory which has not been
proven to be reliable.

A travesty, or so it seemed. But let’s pause for a moment: if we could
predict an earthquake, what exactly would we do? Let’s say we knew a
magnitude 7.0 earthquake might hit Los Angeles in the next 30 days. Would
we tell people to evacuate Los Angeles—for a month? Or, if they stayed, to
remain inside and stop driving? In Los Angeles? And what if, like Giuliani,
we got the location wrong? So millions of people fled Los Angeles for…the
epicenter of the quake?

Now imagine that we only had 45 minutes warning of a possible earthquake.
If we were good—really good—we might be able to get a meaningful message on
the airwaves in time. We might be able to remind people to duck, cover and
hold if the shaking starts. We could tell them to stay inside and not
drive. And the warnings would prevent some casualties.

But the truth is, with earthquakes (and hurricanes, fires and floods), the
biggest challenge is not forecasting—not anymore, not in the developed
world. Yes, it is nice to know when the ground is about to shake and the
sky is about to fall, but the hardest problem by far is what to do next—and
how to motivate people to do it.

The final frontier is not picking a date for the apocalypse; it’s getting
people to bolt their bookshelves to the walls and buy earthquake insurance
in advance. The challenge (in Italy and everywhere) is enforcing serious
building codes, the kind that prevent schools from collapsing in even the
worst-case scenarios.

After all, we predicted Hurricane Katrina ad nauseam before it happened.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune predicted it in a five-part series in 2002.
The federal, state and local government predicted it in a detailed training
exercise called Hurricane Pam, conducted in 2004, one year before Katrina.
There was really nothing surprising about how that hurricane played out
(except maybe that the death toll was lower than many had predicted).

And we can sort of predict earthquakes, too. Ready? OK, over the next 30
years, the probability of a major quake occurring in the San Francisco Bay
area is about 67%, according to scientific estimates. Done. The real
mystery is not about the earth’s crust but about us—and whether we will do
everything we can to prevent it from being a catastrophe. The strength of
our houses and our roads matters more than the intensity of the tremor.
That’s why an earthquake in California can kill 63 people, while one of
roughly comparable intensity in Pakistan kills 100,000.

“Fight or Flight”...and a few of my other favorites. Check out my piece on the mythology of disasters in the Times (of London).

Got any others you’d care to add? (Is this not the most fun party game of all time? Come on, admit it.)

You know, I’m sure, that this is National Public Health Week. OK, well, I’m telling you. This year’s theme, “Building the Foundation for a Healthy America,” seems especially relevant to the types of things we discuss here.

Beyond a doubt, a healthier America is a more prepared one. As Amanda points out in her book, people with low physical abilities were three times as likely to be injured while evacuating the Trade Center on 9/11. In car crashes, heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. More firefighters die from heart attacks and strokes than from fires.

A healthy American is better equipped to handle difficult or stressful situations.  Unfortunately, Americans aren’t as healthy as they can or should be.  But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Watch the American Public Health Association’s newest video about the importance of public health. 

Once you’ve done that, check out the campaign to make this the Healthiest Nation in One Generation.

If you need more motivation to visit www.generationpublichealth.org, do it for me. I’m the one behind the site’s content.

David Simon (the man behind “The Wire”) is in New Orleans filming “Treme,” a show about New Orleans musicians “picking up the pieces” after Hurricane Katrina.

Simon told David Carr at the New York Times that “Treme” is “a show about why New Orleans matters.”  If HBO picks up “Treme” for a full season, cameras will return (after hurricane season) to capture what Simon calls the “under-chronicled” neighborhoods and communities.  And who better to do that than the man who brought us a TV show about another great neglected American city, Baltimore?