Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The other day, I did a book event at Politics & Prose, a fabulous book store in DC. You can listen to it on NPR, and if you speed through the not-so-thrilling part where I am yapping (to about minute 16), you start to hear the questions. People’s comments were smart, thoughtful and sometimes a little weird--in a good way.

I couldn’t believe how fun it was, to tell you the truth. There was even a seismologist there, along with one of the foremost experts on building safety in the world, all of which was a little intimidating. But they were gentle.

One of the nice things about this topic is that everyone has a unique and valuable story. You’d be surprised how many people have had life-or-death experiences--and the details are often very different from what you would expect. Some of them have shared their stories in comments on this site, and each one is remarkable in its own way.

Since I live in DC, it was particularly painful to read this CQ interview with the DC Homeland Security Chief. It bothered me on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start.

But let’s start with panic. Check this out:

Q: Let’s talk about evacuation routes. You know what evacuation is like during rush hour. If I were a terrorist, I’d strike right during rush hour....Practically speaking, there is no evacuation possibility, is there?

A: Evacuation will be tough. I’m not going to sit here and tell you otherwise. And again, during a scenario like you proposed, there would be a lot of panic, a lot of chaos. I think that when word got out that it was a nuclear device, clearly people would be trying to get as far away from the detonation area as fast as they can. I don’t think there’s any question of that.

Oh Lord. First of all, no one in charge of a high-risk city (or any city) should predict panic in the event of a disaster. It is very rare. Much more rare than we expect, as I detail in the book. And even if it might happen, to predict it with certainty is the kind of fear-mongering that can do more harm than the actual panic. It encourages officials to keep life-saving information secret from the public ("Well, if they are going to panic, perhaps we should not tell them that it was a radiation event at all...?").

Or, as veteran disaster expert Dennis Mileti told me: “Do you know how many Americans have died because someone thought they would panic if they gave them a warning? A lot.”

OK, let’s move on. The interview also showed that my city’s homeland security chief was not very good at communicating disaster response to a reporter. I’m not saying it’s easy. But he needs to get better at it. The worst outcome would be if he decided to just stop doing interviews. We need to hear from this guy--early and often. But he needs to learn how to break it down so that regular people can understand what he is talking about. The “Incident Command System” is not something most people understand.

Q: Who’s in charge during in a major emergency in the city?

A: Well, I think we all operate under the Incident Command system, to have consistency and commonality among different agencies at the federal, state and local level responding to an event.

So who’s in charge would depend on the event, and who we believe is most qualified agency-slash-person to lead that event. So it’s not just a matter of saying it’s a certain federal, state or local person, but who’s best qualified to handle that event. And it usually depends on who is first on the scene. The first person on the scene is the incident commander, until someone else comes on the scene, who’s most qualified. And that’s how the incident command is determined.

I asked my pal Eric Holdeman, who ran emergency services for Seattle and the surrounding area for many years, to take a look at the interview. His response is here, and it is sympathetic to the official--which is a helpful reminder of just how hard it can be to do these interviews.

Personally, I thought the CQ reporter focused way too much on the “gotcha” questions. “Who is in charge?” seems like a good question. And it is. But you can’t expect the answer to be a simple one. If a nuclear device ever goes off near the White House, as the reporter had hypothesized, regular people should not expect anyone to be “in charge” for a good, long while.

But I did think he was right to push the DC official to explain how exactly people are supposed to hear about evacuation plans. That is crucial.

Speaking of, when I went to the DC emergency planning site to type in my address and find my evacuation route, as the DC homeland security chief recommended in the interview… I couldn’t get it to work.

I tried two different browsers and several different addresses. If anyone else can get it to work, please let me know!

Otherwise, I just may panic.

Just got word that The Unthinkable will be published in Korea by DD World, in Portugal by Oficina do Livro and in Russia by Eksmo. I am flattered, though I suspect this has less to do with me than with the shared sense that disasters are a threat—and a bit of a mystery still—in every part of the world. (That and the fact that Crown’s Karin Schulze, who has been handling the foreign rights, is a tireless, passionate advocate for the book, for which I am eternally grateful.)

I just got back from the one conference I go to every year. About 400 disaster experts get together near Boulder, Colo., and consider the country’s hazardscape.

Each time, there is a lot of lamentation about all the deaths and losses that could have been avoided from the year gone by. ("Natural disaster” is not a phrase you hear in that crowd, since they know most disasters could be turned into mere emergencies with foresight and money.) It’s a thoughtful, passionate group of academics and government types who are well-accustomed to suppressing their rage.

Here are some of the more surprising revelations I picked up while I was there:

* Climate Change & Disasters: Disasters have become more frequent and more costly, as I’ve mentioned before. But very little of that increase is due to climate change, according to an analysis by political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. It’s almost entirely due to development near water. In other words, we’ve built bigger cities near water and stripped away the natural protection that used to be there. So if you took the hurricane that hit Miami in 1926 and replayed it today in Miami, the same hurricane would create 1.5 to 2 times the losses--of Hurricane Katrina (the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history). So the weather is less important than the way we have changed the planet on the ground.

* Politics & Disasters: There are 50% more flood declarations in a presidential election year, according to Pielke.

* The Candidates & Disasters: At a panel on which presidential candidate would do a better job on emergency management, the one certainty was that we still know very little. What would Barack Obama or John McCain do to fix FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security or to prepare the country for the next Katrina? Each candidate has potential strengths, but since this is not a major issue for voters, we really don’t know much yet.

I asked the panel members what they would like to ask the candidates at a debate. The best response I got was from Beverly Cigler at Penn State, who suggested asking Obama and McCain: “What is homeland security?”

* Hurricane Katrina: As you might expect, there was much despair over the pace of recovery of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina. “Delays of every organization have had such a dampening effect on the recovery of social services, neighborhoods, congregations,” said Shirley Laska of the University of New Orleans. “I’ve come to think that the bureaucracies have become numb to what delay means.”

* The Next Disaster: As for the future, there were dire predictions about the fate of Sacramento, which has one of the highest risks of levee failure in the country. And the earthquake experts were mumbling that California residents should now expect to be on their own for 7 days after the Big One--not 3, as has been long publicized. Those are warnings worth listening to, depressing as they may be. The first year I went to the conference, there was much talk about how New Orleans was sure to be destroyed by a hurricane. Katrina happened the next month.

There was also a lovely BBQ on the last night in the mountains. So it wasn’t all bad.

keep the garbage! That was the genius idea of Steve Kurtz and his artist friends after his house in Buffalo, NY, was seized by the FBI four years ago in a bioterrorism investigation that led no where. Now he has put the things the FBI left behind on display in an art gallery in Buffalo. The exhibit will probably tour New York City and Berlin, as well.

I recently spent the day with Steve for a Time.com story. First, we took a tour of his house, pausing to notice any remaining evidence of the raid ("See that?” said Steve, pointing to scratch marks on the inside of his attic door, “That’s where my cat was clawing at the door while they searched the house.” Note: the FBI says agents dutifully fed and watered said cat during their search.)

Then we went to the nearby gallery where his exhibit was on display. Staring at the tower of empty pizza boxes and energy-drink bottles, many thoughts enter your mind: How can the government cause such havoc in a person’s life with so little to go on? Where is the accountability when the case is ultimately dismissed by a judge? And finally, why are there no coffee or caffeinated soda bottles in the FBI’s garbage?

That last one didn’t make it into the story. But it was weird: hundreds of water and Gatorade bottles, no caffeine. Steve speculated that maybe FBI agents aren’t allowed to drink caffeine. I asked the FBI spokesperson in Buffalo, and she disabused me of that particular notion. Agents are indeed allowed to drink caffeine, she said. But after hearing Steve’s story, you do start to think that anything might be possible.

Click here for a video that Steve and his art ensemble put together about the raid.