Vivian Reyes lives in San Francisco, where she likes to go biking and play with her puppy. She is also an emergency medicine doctor who recently went to Haiti to help with the relief effort.
I watched all the Chile “looting” footage I could find yesterday. It was hard to know what I was looking at, as it always is when you are watching disasters from afar--and often even when you are right there. I mostly saw people carrying water, diapers, sacks of flour and other necessities. I saw young men playing Robin Hood, throwing paper towels and toilet paper rolls from storefront balconies to older women waiting, arms uplifted, below.
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…
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.…
In Indonesia, emergency workers are having a very hard time getting into several remote villages devastated by last Wednesday’s 7.6-magnitude earthquake. As we’ve seen in every major disaster in history, regular people matter more than anyone else in the darkness of these voids. During the golden hours when rescue is possible, civilians do much of the lifesaving--and they are capable of remarkable creativity. It is wrenching and inspiring at once.
A few examples out of Indonesia:
“Every day on the road to Pariaman, a hard-hit district in the north,…
I’ve been thinking about why it is we are so obsessed with predicting disasters--over and above preventing them. What is so magical about a forecast? The answer may have something to do with the way the brain is wired. The brain loathes uncertainty. It’s a survival skill, except when it isn’t. We like patterns, which helps explain why we like music and storytelling. But we fear things we can’t predict. So we read horoscopes or watch CNBC—or sell all of our stocks when the market is low--just to stop the itch of the unknown.
Last week’s magnitude 6.3 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, triggered a flurry of earnest but confused conversations around the world. Why, TV reporters asked the experts, can’t we predict earthquakes by now? And the scientists humbly explained, as they do after every earthquake, that it remains impossible to know exactly when and where the earth’s plates will slip. Despite millions of dollars and decades of research, it’s very hard to do.
Then came alarming news: an Italian scientist did indeed predict last Monday’s quake, it turns out! But no one listened to…
