Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

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.

The New 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 Times reports:

“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.

This AP story does a good job explaining why Haiti is always getting hammered by one disaster or another. It’s not just about location:

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.

Today at noon on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC.