OK, so you may not have noticed between election mania and fiscal implosions, but National Preparedness Month is almost over. Part of the reason you may not have noticed, ironically, is that so many of the country’s preparedness soldiers were too busy dealing with actual hurricanes to do PR about future hurricanes.
Right before things got out of hand, the Red Cross was nice enough to come visit my office and chat with me about the book. You can see some of our conversation here.
My colleagues at Time, Karen Tumulty and Massimo Calabresi, have written a story that details what officials are afraid will happen without a bailout. Nicely done.
On Sept. 18, Paulson and Bernanke laid out the dark scenario for stunned-silent congressional leaders: a stock-market crash, businesses going under, unemployment soaring, consumers unable to get so much as a car loan, banks failing so fast that they would quickly drain the federal deposit insurance fund--and with it, countless people’s life savings. And unlike the chain reaction that came over the course of weeks and months in 1929, this one would happen in a matter of days, if not faster.
Now why didn’t Paulson and Bernanke explain this directly to the people who are paying for the bail-out in the very beginning? Because they were worried about a self-fulfilling prophecy? They were afraid millions of people would drain their bank accounts before Congress could pass a rescue plan?
As I mention below, this fear of public hysteria is usually more powerful than the hysteria. And it must be weighed against the need to gain the public’s trust--in order to get said bail-out.
Last I checked, there have been no mobs in the street since the Time story came out. I would be curious to see the ATM receipts in the Capitol, however…
Listening to US officials warn of a fiscal crisis, I am struck by how much they sound like officials on the brink of a disaster or a terrorist attack. In both cases, the official instinct is to say less rather than more. This is a mistake.
We hear vague warnings of impending doom--but no details. We are expected to follow orders--and support a $700 billion bail-out package--without knowing what will happen if we don’t. And now the proposed bail-out plan is vague, too.
No one can predict the future. But it is obvious that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush are being vague partly because they are worried about a financial panic. So they are being intentionally mysterious with the public (but not with Congress) about what might happen if we don’t do what they say. This is a legitimate fear. The stock market rises and falls on emotion more than facts.
But we know from a long history of physical disasters that the overly vague approach can be self-fulfilling. Mysterious threats communicate many messages. One message is that officials do not trust the public; sensing this, the public in turn tends not to trust officials. The whole conversation becomes steeped in suspicion.
After all, these are the same characters who downplayed fears about a deep recession earlier this year. So if they are going to ask for the public’s trust, they are going to have to be more specific. This is a difficult and delicate balancing act, it is true. But this administration does not have enough credibility in the bank to err on the side of secrecy.
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.
