Check out this story I did for Time.com about the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history—which almost wiped Galveston off the map.
Why wasn’t there more talk of this after Hurricane Ike? It’s always fascinating to consider which disasters get forgotten. Often it has less to do with the amount of destruction—and more to do with what else was going on at the time.
That helps explain why so few of us know much about the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.
Let me say again: 675,000 fatalities in the U.S. alone.
But there was also a war going on, of course, which is partly why it’s been wiped from our collective memory. To learn more about it, I highly recommend this CDC site on the history of the Great Pandemic—complete with very cool searchable map of the country.
I’m headed up to NY on Thursday for the anniversary of 9/11. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’d rather not be there on that day. Any other day but that one. I was living in Manhattan on 9/11, and I maintain a deep affection for the city. I love the train ride up, the happy-cup coffee I’ll get on the street when I arrive, the rush of consumption and conversation and humanity.
But to see it up close on that day is always a little raw. It’s hard to know what expression to put on your face. Let alone what to feel in your heart. Other than the hole that was there the day before and the year before. Seven years is a lot and nothing all at once.
But the city churns on, in some ways for the better. The World Trade Center Survivors’ Network has a day of remembrance planned for people who evacuated from the Trade Center. Obama and McCain will pay their respects together at Ground Zero, which is kind of a nice touch. On Friday, I’ll be moderating a panel at the ServiceNation Summit on creative ideas to get people involved in disaster relief. I’m not sure if we’ll come up with anything revolutionary, but there’s always that chance.
OK, so a smallpox epidemic is not something you want to visualize. How about a dirty bomb? Not so much.
But humor me for just a second. I want to share with you a report that a wise man sent to me earlier today. It came out a while ago, but for some reason I had never heard of it. It’s a really powerful study of the huge disconnect between emergency plans—and people’s real plans. A case study of what happens when emergency plans are not written with the public in mind.
The study found that plans to respond to these emergencies won’t work because people will not react the way planners want them to. In a smallpox outbreak, only 43% of the population said they would follow instructions to go to a public site to be vaccinated. In a dirty bomb explosion, only 59% of the population said they would stay inside the building they were in for as long as officials told them.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Redefining Readiness study found that the public’s reluctance to follow instructions is not due to ignorance, recalcitrance, or panic. Quite the contrary, most people have solid, common-sense reasons for their behavior. Because current plans have been developed without the direct involvement of the public, they don’t account for all of the risks people would face. As a result, the plans make it unnecessarily difficult for many people to decide on the best course of action to protect themselves and their family. Even worse, the plans inadvertently create serious and unnecessary risks for millions of people.
You always have to be cautious when you are looking at polls that ask people what they intend to do…at some distant, unimaginable point in the future. People don’t know for sure until they get there. But I still found the report valuable, and I wish every emergency planner had a copy on his nightstand.
Round and round we go. Any bets on how long until we get to Hurricane Omar? Check out my latest Time.com story about Why Disasters are Getting Worse. (Hint: It’s not because of climate change. Not mostly, anyway.)
Gustav is churning through the Cayman Islands today, just in time for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It’s already clear that Gustav will be a serious hurricane when it makes landfall on the Gulf Coast late Monday or early Tuesday. Right now, it sure looks like it’s aiming for Louisiana, just like old times—although it could smack down anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to South Texas.
Other than that, Gustav feels a lot different from Katrina so far. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has been in Baton Rouge since Thursday. FEMA has been filling my inbox with eager beaver press releases and teleconference alerts. And Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, seems to be in close touch with the locals in New Orleans and the feds in Washington.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is still around (the more things change…), but this time he is saying he will probably call for a mandatory evacuation as early as Saturday morning—which would be a day before he did the same thing in advance of Katrina. This time, there is a plan for evacuating people who don’t have a way out of the city. And the Army Corps of Engineers is saying the city is better protected from flooding than it was three years ago. (But only barely.)
It’s worth remembering, though, that Katrina was only a Category 3 hurricane. And it did not directly hit New Orleans. So even though it may feel like the Gulf Coast has already seen the worst possible scenario, it just ain’t so. Here’s hoping Gustav is a friendly ghost.
I did a short piece for Time this week on the new book, The Obama Nation, by the guy who co-wrote the 2004 hit job on John Kerry, Unfit for Command. Both books were bestsellers.
I didn’t like it, I think it’s safe to say. Let me know if I was too subtle.
The crash of the Spanair flight in Madrid on Wednesday was exceptionally awful, even within the already grim category of plane crashes. Only 19 of the 172 people on board survived. In most serious plane accidents, the survival rate is higher, and passenger behavior can make a big difference. (The cause of the crash is still unknown.)
In this case, I was particularly struck by the story of one survivor from the crash—a young boy who was rescued by a firefighter. Moments after he was pulled from the fiery wreck, he repeatedly asked the firefighter where his father was—and if what was happening was real. “When will this film end?” he asked.
This is a heartbreaking example of how the brain strives to normalize even the most atrocious of catastrophes. I’ve seen different versions of this behavior in all kinds of disasters from terrorist attacks to shipwrecks.
Our brains work by recognizing patterns; when something happens, we sort through our database of experiences to make sense of it. But in a disaster, the only precedent we have in our heads may be what we have seen in the movie theater. So that is naturally what we think of.
There is something poignant about the way this boy’s mind was coping with the violence he had just experienced; he was wishing hard for the movie to be over.
There is an unexpected irony that comes with publishing a book. You spend years scouring the Earth for stories; then the book comes out, and the stories start coming to you.
All summer, people from all over the world have been sending me unforgettable stories of human behavior in near-death experiences. Some of these stories arrived in private email messages that I can’t share; others are embedded in the comments on this site; and many more are floating in the ether, in blogs, articles and on TV. Check out this TV News segment that aired last night, from an ABC affiliate in Phoenix, AZ. They did a nice job with the book, and they also found a classic story of delay and denial.
