Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The Unthinkable hits the UK on July 3, 2008.

This is exciting since so much of the book relies on the wisdom of British researchers and survivors. The UK has long been way ahead of most places, including the States, when it comes to fire safety. That’s partly because London burned down twice—in 1212 and 1666. Nothing focuses the research funding like a mass-casualty disaster.

To understand computer models of crowd behavior in fire, I met with Ed Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich in London. Galea is a smart guy who stubbornly insists we can get better—much better—at designing buildings, ships and airplanes with real people in mind. We met in his office one summer day and spoke without interruption for four hours, surrounded by piles of videotapes, books and photos of tragedies gone by. 

Today’s New York Times has a story about the lack of good options for FEMA disaster housing. The tainted trailers obviously won’t work, and many other ideas are too expensive, too big or too nice, believe it or not.

Stories like this remind me how money does not always beget resilience. This country has enough talent and resources to build a house-in-a-box that keeps people safe and healthy (but is cheap to replace if a truly nightmarish storm comes in—and the people have to evacuate). But three years after Katrina, the options are slimmer than they should be.

I recently met a woman who has spent the past six years living and working in Ghana. She told me a story of watching a Hurricane Katrina documentary with some of the locals. The film detailed how diapers, strollers and bottles had to be rushed from around the country to help the babies in the storm’s path.

In Ghana, this detail seemed a little strange. There, infants don’t use diapers. Women carry babies on their backs and learn to detect the signs of an imminent excretion. Then they hold the babies over the side of the road. I am glad we don’t do that here; the downside of raw sewage on the street obviously outweighs the upside. But it was a reminder of how developed countries are sometimes more vulnerable to certain, smaller risks than underdeveloped countries.

Americans used to build their houses themselves. We knew how to do it, and we knew what kind of weather the houses would withstand. Luckily for us, we’ve forgotten. We now spend more time watching TV shows about remodeling our bathrooms than we do learning how to harden our houses against storms that happen every year.

I love diapers. I thank God for diapers. But I suspect I could learn something from the resilience of people who have never bought Pampers. 

One day, you could get a text message from the president telling you to evacuate your home because of a chemical spill—or to take shelter in your basement because of a radiation attack. Today, the feds adopted rules for a nationwide text-message alert system. (Don’t panic: the messages would be free, and you could opt out if you wanted.)

A sensible idea. Regular people have been using text messages to save themselves and find loved ones for years. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of kids taught their parents to text—and it was the only way to communicate for days.

But like most hi-tech emergency tools, texting creates new problems while fixing old ones. Putting aside the logistical challenges, which are formidable (as is, the program isn’t expected to be in place until 2010), there is the problem of mission creep.

I get emergency alerts from Washington, DC, on my cell phone and over email. You would be stunned by how many messages I have gotten. Judging by quantity alone, you would think I lived in the middle of an interplanetary war. I once got 7 messages in one morning because of…rainy weather.

Weather is the obsession of the Alert DC people. It’s a legitimate concern, of course. Weather kills a lot of people nationwide every year. But slightly above-average winds or a potential threat of hail send these guys into hysterics.

Naturally, I’ve stopped paying a huge amount of attention to the alerts. Which is a shame, because I might need them one day.

It’s that time again! Hurricane predictions are out from Colorado State University. These predictions are like horoscopes: your brain knows they may be totally wrong, but there is something irresistible about them anyway.

So let’s indulge for a moment: just so you know, the CSU team now predicts a worse-than-average hurricane season, anticipating 8 hurricanes. (The average is 6.) This prediction is more dire than their December estimate because the forecasters have more data now. They make their predictions by comparing oceanic and atmospheric trends to periods before other, past hurricane seasons. They have only been wrong (about whether it will be a better or worse than average season) 13 times out of the past 58 years.

The next forecast comes out in June, which is when hurricane season begins. It’s worth staying tuned. Even though hurricane predictions are imprecise, they are better than nothing. And since we know for sure that we are in a cycle of dangerous hurricanes—and that we have placed more of our lives and property at risk than ever before because of the way we live—we should make the most of our modern advantages, such as they are.

I have a great job. I parachute into people’s lives and ask them questions. I cover risk and homeland security for Time Magazine, but I get to define the beat broadly—so broadly that I often write things that have nothing to do with anything at all.

This week, for example, I’m writing a story for dead-tree Time about the intimate details of the life of Barack Obama’s mother. I asked the man questions that are just none of my business, and he answered them. I met his sister under a palm tree in Honolulu, and we talked about their mama’s rice-paddy hat collection. I read a book about the traditions of Indonesia just to get a sense of why their mother loved the country so.

But most of the time, I write about things going wrong—about terrorist attacks, hurricanes and assorted acts of villainy. I recently wrote a book about how people behave in disasters and how we can learn to do better. I had my brain examined for signs of weakness; I interviewed a man who survived the worst sea disaster in modern European history, a woman whose wedding was cut short by one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history, and a physicist who models crowd behavior in plane crashes.

I can’t argue that the world needs another blog. I am writing this mostly because the space now exists. I am writing it because I want to share the shiny curios that I find between official stories and hear what you think.