Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

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. 

Before she left, Dr. Reyes read The Unthinkable. Much to my relief, she found it useful. And she also learned some lessons which are not in the book. Her blog post has some specific realizations about fear, chaos and the small problems created by spontaneous acts of generosity.

We have all heard the statement, “Communication is always the biggest problem during a disaster.” In retrospect, I never truly understood the implications of this statement until now. When I arrived in Haiti, local phone coverage was intermittent, at best.  Even when calls went through, the reception was often so bad that it was more frustrating than helpful. Satellite phones were unreliable and generally unusable.  Surprisingly, my iPhone seemed to send and receive text messages and email without much problem. While this was good for simple communications, texting proved too time-consuming, and time was not a luxury that I had. Coordinating relief operations via any electronic means proved to be difficult, and face-to-face communication became invaluable....[T]he time delay and content limits of text messages made me realize how important it is to be self-sufficient and decisive during the aftermath of a disaster.

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.

Not to say that these people are wrong--or right. Just to say, I don’t know either way. I do think looting is happening, but it is equally clear that the reporting of the looting is somewhat more righteous than it probably should be.

What is looting? Is it the taking of property after a disaster? If so, then was it looting when some World Trade Center evacuees on 9/11 broke into soda machines and distributed water to people in the stairways? What about when civilians took water trucks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and drove around neighborhoods distributing clean water? Where is the line?

The one consensus seems to be what I call the “plasma TV test.” If people are taking TVs, then that, we can all agree, is probably looting. Especially if they are fancy TVs! You see this pattern after most big disasters. First comes the catastrophe, then comes TV people talking about the generalized fear of looting--then comes a strange and disconcerting looting montage: footage of people carrying groceries out of stores, hearsay about violence and, finally, reports of stolen plasma TVs.

Here is one of the many plasma-TV stories to come out of Chile. (Notice the photo, which features a disheveled and frightened young man carrying...diapers.)

As I’ve written before, looting reports usually turn out to be exaggerated after most disasters. Looting happens, and it is damaging to the relief effort and the social fabric, but it rarely represents more than a drop in the bucket compared to the damage inflicted by the disaster itself.

As Ilan smartly pointed out in a comment to the previous post, we just don’t know much about disaster looting. What we do know is mostly from the U.S., which may or may not be relevant in this case. The scant research that has been done outside the U.S. suggests that it only happens in a major way when three other pre-existing conditions are met:

1. Dramatic disparity between rich and poor.
2. High levels of petty crime and gang activity.
3. An ineffective and corrupt police force.

We will one day (hopefully) get better information about what happened in the streets after Chile’s earthquake. Until then, my strategy is to listen to all the reports I hear with one question in the back of my mind: “How do you know that?” In other words, did you see it?

For example, when reading this Washington Post story today (which also includes the plasma TV claim. Check!), I had to wonder about this line:

“...the pillaging was carried out largely by poorer Chileans.”

Really? How do you know? Did you do a random sampling of the pillagers and survey them about their income levels? Or are you making that conclusion based on how the 27 looters you saw looked--what they were wearing, how they spoke, etc.? Either way is OK, but I’d love to know. 

I’ll be talking today about the Chilean earthquake and the reports of looting on the BBC’s The World Tonight.

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.”