So let me first say that I wouldn’t want to be head of homeland security and emergency management for the city of Washington, DC. It’s an incredibly hard job, and not just because it means protecting a city that is a terrorist’s fantasy land. The thing that makes it hardest of all is the fact that it is home to at least two dozen competing law enforcement agencies, many of which don’t really like each other very much.
In any city, getting police and firefighters (or the FBI and the CIA) to get along before, during and after a disaster is like trying to get through a long, hot family vacation without any fights. It’s almost impossible, and in DC, it’s impossible times ten.
In addition to the city police, known as the Metropolitan Police Department, DC is policed by the Secret Service, the Park Police, the Capitol Police, the National Zoo Police...and on and on...all tripping over each other in what is, by any measure, not a very big city. (A while back, when I tried to get a count of the total number of policing outfits in DC for TIME Magazine, neither the Mayor’s office nor the city police department could tell me the exact number. It wasn’t that the information was secret; it was that no one knew.)
So given this jurisdictional cluster, I was distressed to see this in the Washington Post:
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s nominee to lead the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency was unanimously approved Tuesday by a D.C. Council committee, despite her lack of experience in the field. The nomination still has to be approved by the full council.
Millicent D. Williams, who has a degree in business with a concentration in commercial banking, previously worked as president of the D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp. and executive director of Serve D.C.....Williams also does not hold a security clearance that would allow her to receive information about suspicious activity and attend meetings of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. She testified at her confirmation hearing Friday that she is in the process of obtaining the clearance and is pursuing a master’s degree in homeland defense and security. She said in an e-mail to The Washington Post that she was pleased to have been approved.
Now, Ms. Williams may turn out to be an outstanding homeland security chief. I wholeheartedly hope she succeeds, in no small part because I live here. And her experience coordinating citizen volunteers will help her. But it is strange that Mayor Fenty doesn’t see this as a post where decades of emergency management experience matters. Because I can promise you that the people she needs to manage--and make get along--do think experience matters.
After Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown was ousted as the head of FEMA, with many critics in Congress and in the Gulf Coast lamenting his lack of relevant experience. In fact, one year later, Congress passed a law requiring the head of FEMA to have experience in emergency management--just as the U.S. solicitor general and the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are required to have relevant experience before taking their jobs.
And yet, the same common sense apparently does not apply in the nation’s capital. I was glad to see that the Post called Eric Holdeman to get a response to this situation. Holdeman is one of the people I trust most on disaster management, partly because he is smart and partly because he has...experience:
Eric Holdeman, a consultant on homeland security based in Washington state, said in an interview that Williams’s résumé is sparse for the District, where security issues are amplified by its status as the nation’s capital. “This is the most demanding of positions there is,” he said. “The issue would be: Is she 360 degrees, all-around proven in actual disaster . . . ? No. If I was the mayor of D.C., I’d do a national search.”
Interestingly, after Congress passed that law requiring FEMA directors to have experience, something shocking happened. Bush reserved the right to ignore that requirement (issuing a controversial “signing statement” to that effect.) So I suppose Bush and Fenty have this in common. Luckily, when Obama chose his own head of FEMA, he did not see things the same way.
Check out this quote from today’s Wall Street Journal story about the painful teacher layoffs occurring around the country due to budget shortfalls. Let me know if you see anything strange about it. Mr. Bafia is defending the seniority system, which is used in most school districts to determine who gets let go. Last hired, first fired, in other words. As opposed to an alternative, which NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and others have proposed--which is to consider teachers’ performance as one relevant factor when figuring out whom to let go (another way of saying, hey, this job is really important. Let’s at least consider the interests of the students in the classroom when we make these decisions):
“We don’t want to go back to the ‘50s or ‘60s, when people were laid off because of the color of their skin or because a woman was pregnant,” said Glenn Bafia, executive director of the Seattle Education Association, a teachers union.
OK, this quote captures something really unusual and important about the strange culture of American public schools. First of all, to state the obvious: No, we don’t want to go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s when people were laid off because of the color of their skin or because a woman was pregnant. We also don’t want to go back to 1910, when women couldn’t vote. Or to 1945, when African-Americans were segregated into “separate-but-equal” schools and train cars under the authority of the Supreme Court. That would be no good at all.
Here’s the thing: There is no chance of going back to such a time just because we start considering effectiveness when we have to lay off teachers. If Mr. Bafia had said, “We don’t want to go back to the time of slavery,” surely this WSJ reporter would have asked a follow-up question (like, “What are you talking about? Why would this lead to that?") and included the response. Or cut the quote altogether. But for reasons I do not entirely understand, this quote was allowed to stand without any context.
So allow me to add that context here. The fact is, there are layers upon layers of state and federal laws that make it illegal to terminate people’s jobs based on the color of their skin or the fact that they are pregnant. Or, to quote the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects individuals against employment discrimination on the basis of race and color as well as national origin, sex, or religion. It is unlawful to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race or color in regard to hiring, termination, promotion, compensation, job training, or any other term, condition, or privilege of employment.
Amen to that. And to this:
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions constitutes unlawful sex discrimination under Title VII, which covers employers with 15 or more employees, including state and local governments.
Thank God.
Now, why are some teachers and their union reps still talking as if these laws are not on the books? And what to make of this quote from Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis teachers union, also from the WSJ story today:
“[S]eniority gives us a fair way of saying how do we lay people off in a way that’s equitable.”
Equitable to whom? Equitable to the kids in the school? If not, why not? Aren’t the kids the main purpose of the school? Or are the schools built to provide stable, permanent employment for adults?
Ms. Nordgren says that poor-performing teachers are already being let go in Minneapolis. I hope that’s true, but it is not even close to reality in the vast majority of American schools. In a 2009 report called the Widget Effect, which analyzed 12 diverse districts in 4 states, half of the districts studied had not dismissed a single tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years. None had dismissed more than a few.
Instead, consider what happens in New York City every day. Six hundred teachers who have been accused of misconduct or incompetence report to “work” every day, sitting in six special rooms around the city doing nothing. They punch a time clock and then they go to sleep, play cards or chat. Let me say again: 600 teachers. Why? Because in the upside down world of education, the city’s contract with the union requires that any charges against them be heard by an arbitrator and, until the charges are fully resolved, they continue to get paid and accrue their pensions and other benefits. (To read the best story ever written on upside down world, in my opinion, check out Steven Brill’s 2009 New Yorker story on the ”rubber rooms.")
The combined laws of New York City, New York state and the United States of America are not good enough for the people responsible for teaching children in New York City. So here we are, in upside down world, where the people getting discriminated against--systematically, without regard to the effects on their future earnings and happiness--are the short people we like to lovingly call “the future.”
Disaster after disaster has shown that regular citizens are the first-responders, so it’s nice to see federal reports acknowledging this reality. The recently released, first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report places a much-needed emphasis on a resilient and psychologically prepared public:
“Despite our best efforts, some attacks, accidents, and disasters will occur. Therefore, the challenge is to foster a society that is robust, adaptable, and has the capacity for rapid recovery. In this context, individuals, families, and communities—and the systems that sustain them—must be informed, trained, and materially and psychologically prepared to withstand disruption, absorb or tolerate disturbance, know their role in a crisis, adapt to changing conditions, and grow stronger over time.”
OK, but how do we get there? One of the Review’s five homeland security missions is “Ensuring Resilience to Disasters,” but the report is vague at best--a nice fantasy island but no map pointing the way:
“Individuals and families must be prepared to care for themselves for a reasonable period of time after a disaster—some experts have suggested the first 72 hours—and assist their neighbors, reserving scarce public resources to assist those who are injured, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to care for themselves.”
Yes, but we have known that for a long time. How do we motivate people to do this? The report mentions community disaster response programs such as Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and other Citizen Corps programs, and those are promising notions. But for now, they are not nearly as big, creative and well-funded as they would need to be to make a major difference. As this Newsweek story points out, the U.S. hasn’t put up the “funds necessary train ordinary citizens to handle disasters and terror attacks”.
It’s one thing to say the public must be psychologically prepared and another thing to say how. Most of us are so busy trying to survive our day-to-day lives, it’s hard to imagine that rhetoric alone will make much of a difference. As things stand, we are dramatically less resilient (and thus more vulnerable) than other developed nations. AsNewsweeknotes:
“After the 7/7 attack on the London Underground, which killed 52 people, Londoners, recalling their pluck during the Blitz, gamely showed up en masse the next morning for their daily commute. The Israelis make a point of rebuilding blown-up cafés in a matter of days after an attack; similarly, they return to targeted bus lines the day after a bombing. The message is clear: we’re not going to let terrorists break our spirit. Had America rebuilt the Twin Towers in the first years after 9/11, they would be standing tall today as symbols of defiance. Instead, when I drive by Ground Zero, still a gaping pit, I wonder how we would react if New York were hit again.”
That particular story places the blame mostly on politicians (hence the title: “Terror Begins at Home: Fearmongering politicians are scoring cheap political points at the expense of the American people."), and there’s no doubt that such shameless politicking represents part of the problem. But surely there’s more to it than that.
After all, the UK and Israel have, per capita, about as many opportunistic, divisive politicians and sensationalist media outlets as we do. One obvious difference is that they have had more practice with terrorism--and they may be more sophisticated in their attitude as a result. But that can’t be the whole answer either. Advanced human civilizations are capable of evolving to counter new threats without having to experience them on a routine basis. This is the mystery--and the conversation we should be having, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Our brains are wired to fear threats that cause us dread--which is an actual term of art in the risk business. Dread represents all of our evolutionary fears, hopes, lessons, prejudices, and distortions wrapped up in one dark X factor.
In my book, I tried to condense a lot of risk research into one shorthand equation for dread:
Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness
As I read about the Toyota story, about cars accelerating uncontrollably and Toyota executives watching it all in slow motion, I can’t help but notice that this is a perfect storm of dread. Toyota has a very big problem, if that wasn’t already obvious. In addition to the actual, literal problem of a small number of cars going haywire, there is the psychological problem--which may be the bigger one.
A brief status check:
*Uncontrollability: Off the charts.
The brain does not like things it cannot control (which is partly why we fear airplane crashes so much more than car crashes). The idea that your car might suddenly become uncontrollable is, well, scary. To make matters worse, Toyota has not conveyed a consistent message about how to fix the problem--and regain control. The company started off blaming floor mats for the problem. Then, in January, Toyota conceded that there were two separate problems--floor mats, in some cases, and sticky pedals in others. Then there’s this, from an AP story today:
LaHood, in an interview with The Associated Press, defended his department’s handling of the Toyota investigation and said the Japanese automaker was “a little safety deaf” during its probe of the problem. The company was so resistant, LaHood said, that it took a trip from federal safety officials to Japan to “wake them up” to the seriousness of the pedal problems.
*Unfamiliarity: Medium to high.
Most of us are not familiar with how car acceleration works--particularly in modern, high-tech vehicles in which electronic systems now control many functions that used to be handled mechanically. Toyota denies that the electronics are at fault here, but critics of the company are not so confident.
*Imaginability: On the rise.
Thanks to 911 calls like this, in which an off-duty California Highway Patrol Officer asks the dispatcher to pray for him and his family as his Lexus screams towards oncoming cars, we can now imagine what it would feel like to be in this situation. Imagining a threat can make it feel more likely than it actually is.
*Suffering: Not good at all.
Another similarity to a plane crash: the imagined moment of reflection. We realize that with this kind of risk, there may be a period of time between when we realize we cannot slow down and when the car comes rolling (or crashing) to a stop. That is a scary concept. The brain is wired to avoid suffering, which explains why we fear cancer more than we fear heart attacks--which we assume will come on with less warning and less suffering.
*Scale of Destruction: Could be worse.
This is one area which Toyota can use to its advantage. So far, the chances of this happening remain pretty small. And Jim Lentz, the president of Toyota USA, stressed this point on FOX today:
This sticky pedal is very, very rare, and it comes on over time. So, it’s not something that one day you get in your car and you start to have a throttle that starts to stick. It may be slow to respond, to come back. Eventually, it may start to be a little bit sticky or a little bit rough.
But the fact that the company has had to expand the number of cars facing a recall makes the problem feel less contained than it probably is.
*Unfairness: So-So
People buy Toyotas because they are a sure thing. They are safe, reliable and easy to drive. The acceleration problem is a direct affront to all those values. So the risk feels more unfair than if, for example, this were a problem confined to, say, cherry red high-performance race cars.
For now, the recall affects the following cars, according to Toyota. :
Just received the Polish paperback.. I like the dangling rope! Not too Hollywood, nor too Warsaw. As for the title, my handy online Polish-English translation service tells me that it means, roughly, “Survival Instinct.”
(Translator is at a loss to explain subtitle, aside from the obvious word for “catastrophe,” but we’ll hope for the best.)
When a man was stabbed to death early one morning on a NYC subway, a nervous passenger scrambled to pull the emergency brake, immediately stopping the train. Another example of an average citizen averting a disaster?
Not exactly.
TheNew York Times reported this week that the emergency brake is not to be pulled during an emergency. Well, actually, the emergency brake should only be pulled during certain kinds of emergencies, and it’s up to you to know what constitutes an emergency and what doesn’t. In this particular instance, the immediate stopping of the train hindered the arrival of police.
You have to look for it, but New York City Transit’s website does provide an explanation:
“Use the emergency brake cord only when the motion of the subway presents an imminent danger to life and limb. Otherwise, do not activate the emergency brake cord, especially in a tunnel. Once the emergency brake cord is pulled, the brakes have to be reset before the train can move again, which reduces the options for dealing with the emergency.”
If you looked at this explanation before riding the subway, you might know you shouldn’t pull the cord for any little thing, but how are you supposed to know when something poses imminent danger to life and limb? Even the wording of that sentence is weak, considering a myriad of things could pose an imminent danger to life (and also to limb).
If the “emergency, but not all emergencies” brake cord explanation doesn’t make sense when I’m curled up on my couch, how can I be expected to know what to do when I’ve just been through something traumatic? The brain doesn’t function well under stress, and we can’t be expected to instantly differentiate between different types of emergencies. Perhaps it would be better for the brake system to have an automated audio warning that goes off when you open a casing around the brake—reminding you that pulling it will leave the train stranded on the tracks. Or maybe not. But surely this is not the hardest problem humanity has ever overcome. The bigger challenge seems to be that emergency plans are not written for the way our brains work (And the problem is hardly unique to the NYC transit system. If you want to be prepared on Washington, DC’s metro, you’ve got to watch an animated video (only if you have flash, though) before you leave the house.).
Unfortunately, NYC Transit doesn’t see any confusion, telling the Times that the explanation is clear, even when the general public has no clue. The Timesreports:
“Of 20 straphangers interviewed last month at the 14th Street-Eighth Avenue station, about half said that they had no idea when the brake should or should not be used. Those who knew that the brake should not be pulled in most situations seemed at a loss to explain when exactly it would be appropriate.”
From their lackluster response, NYC Transit doesn’t seem to think the pubic can do better, so why try. And maybe that’s the real emergency.
Here’s how the story line usually goes for disasters: First, in the days immediately following the hurricane or quake or other calamity, reporters warn of a generalized “fear” that desperate survivors may turn to violence and looting. Then, sure enough, reporters tell stories of violence and looting. Some are eye witness accounts by credible observers. Most are not.
The thing is, in developed nations, we can say with some certainty that widespread, anti-social behavior almost never happens after a disaster. In fact, the opposite is true. People, like all animals, tend to form groups and show each other great courtesy in times of extreme shock and duress. People do this because it is in their interest. There was looting and some sporadic violence after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, but the mayhem never rose to a level that justified the amount of coverage. More people likely suffered because of the fear of looting and violence--due to delayed relief and search-and-rescue efforts and unnecessarily hostile encounters with police and armed, frightened civilians--than because of actual looting and violence.
That said, there are rare cases in which looting and violence can become widespread. Those cases have not been well-studied, partly because they are not very likely to occur at all anywhere. But one person who has studied this question in relative detail is Enrico Quarantelli, founding director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and a sort of Godfather of disaster sociology.
I’ve interviewed Quarantelli several times over the years. At the moment, our conversation about looting and riots keeps coming back to me as I read the ominous headlines out of Haiti. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Quarantelli heard reports of rampant looting in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He didn’t believe it; after all, the research suggested that looting reports were almost always overblown after disasters. So he went to St. Croix three times to study the situation himself. In the end, he came up with a Theory of Looting. He speculated that widespread looting seemed to only happen when four different conditions were all present:
1. Dramatic disparity between rich and poor.
2. High levels of petty crime and gang activity. ("Gangs are almost always the leaders in any case of mass looting,” Quarantelli said.)
3. An ineffective and corrupt police force. ("A corrupt and ineffective police force doesn’t scare anyone,” he said.)
4. A massive catastrophe. (Hurricane Hugo destroyed or heavily damaged more than 90 percent of all homes in St. Croix--devastation on a comparable scale to the situation in Port-au-Prince.)
Notice that three of the four conditions are all pre-requisites, present before the actual disaster strikes. Another reminder that the health of a city after a disaster is directly related to the health before the disaster.
But anyway, the point is, all of these conditions are present in Haiti. And it’s clear that some looting and violence are happening. The question is, how much? That question is critical because it shapes the entire response effort, from the Americans’ decision of whether to air drop supplies to a Haitian police officer’s decision whether to enter a crowd with his gun drawn--or not.
So far, no one knows what the scale of the misbehavior is. But there have been a few voices urging people not to overreact:
“[O]ver the last two or three days we have seen instances of looting, but we can’t over-exaggerate that point. These are isolated incidents of looting in the commercial districts, where people are gaining access to warehouses that were largely destroyed anyway by the earthquake.
I’ve been in Haiti before with natural disasters, principally floods, and the food rioting and the looting has been much worse than I have seen in Port-au-Prince this time. There are still incidents, but we can still characterize that as isolated incidents, and if we listen to the doctors here and other humanitarian aid organizations, they say they need aid first, security second."--CNN’s Karl Penhaul, Jan. 19, 2010
“My assessment of the security situation is that it is calm at this time. There are incidents of violence. Those who live and work here in Haiti who have been here for years, both within our own embassy and the other international community, ... tell me that the level of violence that we see right now is below and at pre-earthquake levels."--US Lt. Gen. Ken Keen talking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Jan. 19, 2010
Two things to keep in mind in the coming days, particularly if you are covering the disaster or are involved in any way in the relief effort:
1. Watch out for classic reporter shortcuts. These are guaranteed red flags. When reporters don’t have the goods, they break out the passive voice and refer obliquely to “reports” of unnamed origin. In other words, they say things like this:
”Reports of isolated looting and violence intensified as night approached, and there were reports of Haitians streaming out of the capital."--"Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 2010 [I added the italics.]
Or this:
“Angry Haitians have reportedly been using corpses to set up roadblocks in Port-au-Prince to protest those delays."--FOX News, Jan. 15, 2010
Or this:
“UN Food Warehouses in Haiti Reportedly Looted: Looters have reportedly broken into UN food warehouses as tempers rise among the thousands of Haitians awaiting desperately needed emergency aid."--CBC News, Jan. 15, 2010
Beware. I was on a panel with a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter after Katrina, and we were talking about how hard it is for reporters to get good info in disasters--particularly when, as happened in New Orleans, police and city officials are the ones giving you the false information. But the reporter said something that has always stayed with me: “It’s important to remember to use that old basic tool of reporting. Always ask, ‘How do you know that?‘“ Here’s an example where the reporter did not ask that question--or did not share the answer, in any event:
“There are thefts everywhere,” said Joel Querette, 23, a college student camped out at a park near the airport. “People have guns and knives, and they are stealing and looting the stores.”--"Looting Flares Where Authority Breaks Down,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 2010
Now, I don’t mean to belittle the challenge these reporters are up against. It is almost impossible to get good information in a disaster. But given what we DO know: that people tend to expect looting and violence after disasters and that people tend to be wrong, reporters should try to be extra diligent in conveying the limits of their knowledge--and the rest of us should consume media reports with an extra layer of scrutiny.
I had an editor at Time who chewed me out when I used the word, “reportedly,” in a story. I didn’t like it when it happened, and I remember pointing to other legitimate outlets that used the word all the time, but she was right. It’s bogus, and I hereby promise not to do it again. It’s a way to hedge an assertion, since you don’t really know if it is true, when in fact you should either say who is making these reports and how they know--or just resist the urge to trade in hearsay about something so important.
2. Remember that looting is often in the eye of the beholder. It may look like looting on CNN, but that doesn’t mean it is. If I were starving, and I came upon a stash of food in the midst of the rubble after a catastrophe, I’d probably take it and share it with my family. Wouldn’t you? Is that pure looting? Given the scale of the destruction, the bright line between survival behavior and old-fashioned stealing gets gray.
When Quarantelli went to St. Croix after Hurricane Hugo, he concluded that “there was massive looting, by any criteria one would use. Three of the four shopping centers were for all practical purposes totally looted. People even took the light fixtures off the walls.” And yet in other cases, what looked a lot like looting was not: “On the other hand, everyone also believed the Coca-Cola plant had been looted. But it turned out the manager had opened it up as a gesture of good will--’Come and take all the Coca-Cola you want!’”
A couple years from now, some earnest grad student will come out with a report about looting in Haiti after the 2010 quake. And no one will pay much attention. But by then, we will know more, I hope. Until then, we should err on the side of trust, realizing that it means taking risks.
For an idea of how confusing these situations are, even in cases where looting is clearly happening and people are getting hurt, check out this CNN video of Anderson Cooper trying to help a boy injured in the chaos. It is gripping, but at the end, it’s totally unclear what happened--at least to me. And I’m not sure, but I’d guess that if you were there with Anderson Cooper, you would still not have perfect clarity. That’s the nature of disasters. The more desperately you need good information, the less likely you are to find it.
What happens if you take a horrifically poor place and shake it to pieces? I heard a survivor describe the scene in Haiti as “hell on top of hell” on CNN yesterday. We are learning all over again that disasters aren’t “natural” or inevitable. Money matters more than anything else. Which is to say, where and how we live matters more than Mother Nature.
Remember the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California? In magnitude and depth, that quake was similar to the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. The Northridge quake killed 63 people, and the Pakistan one killed about 100,000. The wolf huffs and puffs on every continent in every year, but he always blows down the shanty towns.
Vulnerability to natural disasters is almost a direct function of poverty, said Debarati Guha Sapir, director of the World Health Organization’s Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.
“Impacts are not natural nor is there a divine hand or ill fate,” Sapir said. “People will also die now of lack of follow-up medical care. In other words, those who survived the quake may not survive for long due to the lack of adequate medical care.”
University of South Carolina’s Susan Cutter, who maps out social vulnerability to disaster by county in the United States, said Haiti’s poverty makes smaller disasters there worse.
“It’s because they’re so vulnerable, any event tips the balance,” said Cutter, director of the school’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. “They don’t have the kind of resiliency that other nations have. It doesn’t take much to tip the balance.”
Last month, a study by the Organization of American States concluded that many of the buildings in Haiti were so shabbily constructed that they were unlikely to survive any disaster, CNN reports.
“You could tell very easily that these buildings were not going to survive even a [magnitude] 2 earthquake,” said Cletus Springer, director of the Department of Sustainable Development at OAS in Washington.
Structures were built on slopes without proper foundations or containment structures, using improper building practices, insufficient steel and insufficient attention to development control, the urban planner said.
It doesn’t have to be this way:
After Hurricane Ivan flattened much of Grenada in September 2004, the OAS carried out a similar research effort, then helped the island nation strengthen its building practices, Springer said.
Within three years, artisans and engineers had been trained to strengthen that island’s building-control systems and procedures, he said. Even financing was addressed. “We worked with the banks to be sure we could properly vet applications for mortgages.”
I suppose that should make us feel better about what could be, once the bodies are buried in Haiti. But for now, it can only feel like a massive tragedy.
