The Importance of Context in Disaster Risk Reduction

It is an amusing, but macabre, fiction that Marie-Antoinette said "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche."

The Achilles heel of disaster studies is the way we tend to analyse risks and events without adequate reference to their context. We make assumptions about direct cause-effect relationships between disasters and the agents that give rise to them, but in this age of interconnected, concurrent, cascading impacts, many of the effects are strongly influenced by the political, economic and social realities of modern life. Here are some of the forms taken by the context of disasters and disaster risk reduction.

Trust and communication. Trust in authority and acceptance of emergency messages may be influenced by the general status of communication. This is the age of 'fake news', distortion and excessively selective use of the facts. How can we equate the need to provide life-saving information to people if they become accustomed to disbelieve what they hear, see and read in the news?

Image. Such is the power of mass communication in the modern age that entertainment values have replaced many earlier moral philosophies in the popular mind. This has profound implications for how people respond to disaster, which at worst is seen as a spectacle to enjoy, rather than a source of misery and suffering. Alternatively, aid can be switched on and off by manipulating news and using celebrities to determine the popular agenda (cf. Müller 2013).

Shelter. The population of hazardous areas need homes that will survive and resist disaster. What price shelter in an age of unattainable home loans and unaffordable rents? In many places, the excessive cost of housing is driving down the quality of shelter, as well as its accessibility.

Livelihoods. Livelihoods are the key to recovery from disaster and to the generation of resources for resilience. However, they are under threat from shifting production, artificial intelligence allied to robotisation and mechanisation, the deskilling of jobs, and the decoupling of work from social security and health insurance.

Social and health care. In a global financial climate of austerity, healthcare and social safety nets are being rolled back and downsized. Disaster response is fundamentally about social protection, but in ordinary times this is dwindling. If it loses its continuity with long-term assistance to people who are in need, disaster response will become a transient phenomenon. There is a reluctance to define welfare and an even greater reluctance to implement it unless it carries immediate political benefits.

Migration. Unplanned population movements are giving rise to xenophobic responses. This pervasive phenomenon will surely have some repercussions for the 'therapeutic community' that is supposed to prevail in the immediate aftermath of disaster and for solidarity with people affected by disaster.

Wealth. Imbalances in wealth between the ultra-rich and the poor are increasing constantly. This has been a steady trend since the early 1970s. As disaster risk reduction requires both public and private money to be spent for the common good, we may ask what effect the concentration of wealth is having on the resources available for DRR.

These and many more issues with context demand an answer to the question of how to incorporate it into disaster studies. There is no magic answer, but here are a few observations on possible strategies and procedures.

First, we need to track events and developments in politics, economics and society. We need to ponder their implications for disaster risk reduction.

Secondly, we need to make more effort to add culture to the DRR equation. It has elements that are stable and historical, but also mutable and dynamic. It is an elusive concept, but it needs to be understood, conceptualised and interpreted (Krüger et al. 2015). We need to answer the following questions: (a) What opportunities and constraints does culture offer DRR? (b) In direct terms, how does culture affect DRR? (c) How does cultural metamorphosis affect the exigencies of DRR?

Thirdly, we need to make very careful analyses of risk and disaster situations. We need, not only to make rigorous use of scenarios, but also to extend them to include contexts. The trends inherent in the factors listed above (and many more) need to be identified, understood and analysed in terms of their effect on disasters and disaster risk reduction.

The penalty for not including a thorough analysis of context is that explanations and causal influences will be misidentified, misunderstood and analysed only superficially. That would not be in the interests of anyone who wants to know why we have disasters, why they show particular trends, and what we can do to bring them under control.

References

Krüger, F., G. Bankoff, T. Cannon, B. Orlowski and L.F. Schipper (eds) 2015. Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction. Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 282 pp.

Müller, T.R. 2013.'The Ethiopian famine' revisited: Band Aid and the antipolitics of celebrity humanitarian action. Disasters 37(1): 61-79.

'Optimisation' in disaster relief is a bad joke

Some of the principal characteristics of disaster situations are as follows. (1) Conditions on the ground are uncertain and liable to change in unpredictable ways. (2) Knowledge of conditions is incomplete and likely to remain so for the duration of the emergency, despite the best efforts of all concerned. (3) A common operating picture is created and shared only slowly and with much arduous work. (4) Field commanders and coordinators want simple solutions that require no great effort of thought or computation, not because they are unintelligent, but because they must devote almost all of their attention to directing emergency work. (5) Face-to-face communication is the most vital means of conveying information and the only one that can utilise the full range of people's sensory attributes. (6) Managing the convergence reaction is such a complex logistical exercise that it is inevitable that the outcome is approximate rather than precise.

Recently, there has been a sudden upsurge in the application of operations research (OR) to the management of sudden impact disasters. Mathematical and statistical algorithms are being written in the hope of optimising logistical actions. The circulation of traffic, the evacuation of cities, stockpiling and warehousing relief goods, improving vehicle fleet management, and so on, are some of the goals. Much of the work is inductive and relies on vacuuming up data, whacking them into order and squeezing them through a set of equations or matrices in order to produce the 'perfect' output.

Imagine this in the field. The earth shakes, producing massive destruction and a substantial toll of casualties. We whip out the iPad or laptop computer and turn it on. We turn to WiFi, but it has gone. So has the cable-based network and the local electricity supply. Nevertheless, the device still has some battery power. We crank up the algorithm and work out where best to stockpile relief goods. The solution that the algorithm proposes is unworkable because (a) we have no time and resources to build warehouses; (b) the accessibility of places has changed radically because of route blockages (rubble in the street, buildings in danger of collapse, damaged bridges, etc.); (c) rendezvous points have to be agreed with many organisations.

The process of OR modelling for optimisation of disaster relief is completely dependent on the quality of the assumptions that underlie it. In most cases these are scarce, threadbare, or simply unworkable. They do not mirror the real situation, as most of the modellers have no experience of conception of what that is like.

Science is very susceptible to fads and fashions. Perhaps the stimulus which motivates the current craze for mathematical optimisation of disaster relief is a desire to bring order to chaos. What could be more attractive than turning a messy, inefficient situation into one which is clean, streamlined and super-functional? If this is the motivation, then it ignores--at its peril--the old Aristotlean idea of generatio and corruptio. In disasters, as in so much else, forces are at work that break down order while other forces that create it are also at work and conflict with them. Many disaster plans have gone haywire because people have not done what the assumptions said they would do. One assumption is that we all have the same motives and objectives. We do not.

Perhaps the biggest chasm that would need to be bridged here is the one that occurs between the academics and the field coordinators. How can algorithms work if the cultures are different, have different receptivities, work towards different goals, and have different expectations? Disaster management would be so simple if no people were involved. People are such a nuisance, with their huge variety of attitudes and behaviours (Kirschenbaum 2003).

Will artificial intelligence do the trick? The current craze is to use the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which uses inductive reasoning to make decisions. Rather than substituting the decision process, AHP merely shifts it to a different part of the process. If the initial decisions are wrong, so is the outcome, a classic "garbage in, garbage out" syndrome (Whitaker 2007).

When we have finally got the algorithm to spit out the perfect solution for step one, and have applied it by directing all traffic down one road to one site, the battery finally fades out and the computer is dead. Has anybody got a spare battery? No.

In disaster relief, we do not optimise: we try to muddle through until the end and keep wastage to less than ten per cent.

References

Kirschenbaum, A. 2003. Chaos, Organisation and Disaster Management. Marcel Dekker, New York, 318 pp.

Whitaker, R. 2007. Criticisms of the analytic hierarchy process: why they often make no sense. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 46(7-8) 948-961.

What is essential reading in disaster studies?

Disaster studies have grown enormously since I started in the field 37 years ago. At that time there were few protagonists, two journals and not many papers. Now there are more than 80 journals that deal entirely or mainly with disasters or closely related topics, and more than 500 that publish papers in this field at intervals that vary from occasionally to frequently. There are now many thousands of 'disasterologists' in universities, research institutes and planning and policy offices throughout the world.

As a journal editor who deals with about 800 unpublished manuscripts a year in this field, it often strikes me that one of the biggest issues with papers is that the authors do not have an adequate grounding in the field. This induces them to ignore fundamental research or, equally often, to "reinvent the wheel" by duplicating previous research that they have not read. Lack of familiarity with the field induces model makers to adopt untenable assumptions, which would not stand up in real situations. Theoretical developments are stymied by the tendency of those who have not read enough to go round and round covering debates that have already happened many times before (what is resilience? Who cares?). Finally, the opportunities for discussion are reduced by lack of common ground.

In another of these postings I put forward the idea that 2017 is the centenary of academic studies of disaster. Whether or not that is the case, we are close to some kind of anniversary, as the 1920s were a time in which disaster studies set sail on the choppy sea of academic endeavour.

In conversation with colleagues, it seems that there is some support for the idea that we can compile the core curriculum. This would consist of key academic works that broke new ground and are fundamental to an understanding of what the field is and where it has gone during its century of existence.

I do not wish to be dictatorial. I have no power, moral, intellectual or otherwise, to mandate what should be read. However, I have some ideas about key works and I list them below. Many, even the oldest of them, are available as downloadable pdfs. Please note that the list is tentative and by no means exhaustive. It would be best not to overextend it, but I am sure to have left of some highly significant works. I list the works chronologically and not alphabetically. No doubt the list will grow as others take up the challenge and argue to add, or even subtract, works.

I have not included textbooks. There are some very good ones in circulation, but the choice is up to the reader. I have included books that, in my view, have had a seminal impact upon the development of the subject.

Towards a core curriculum

Dunant, Henri 1859. A Memory of Solferino. International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, 38 pp.

Walford, Cornelius 1879. The Famines of the World, Past and Present. Edward Stanford, London, 303 pp.

Prince, Samuel Henry 1920. Catastrophe and Social Change: Based Upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster. Studies in History, Economics and Public Law no. 94. Colombia University Press, New York, 151 pp.

Barrows, Harlan H. 1923. Geography as human ecology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13: 1-14.

Carr, Lowell Julliard 1932. Disaster and the sequence-pattern concept of social change. American Journal of Sociology 38(2): 207-218.

White, Gilbert Fowler 1945. Human Adjustment to Floods: A Geographical Approach to the Flood Problem in the United States. Research Paper no. 29. Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 225 pp.

Fritz, Charles E. and Eli S. Marks 1954. The NORC studies of human behavior in disaster. Journal of Social Issues 10(3): 26-41.

Moore, Harry Estill 1956. Towards a theory of disaster. American Sociological Review 21: 734-737.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956. Human Behavior During Extreme Situations. Disaster Study no. 1. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 35 pp.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956. Tornado in Worcester. National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Disaster Study no. 3. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 166 pp.

Fritz, Charles E. and J.H. Mathewson 1957. Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control. Disaster Study no. 9. National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 102 pp.

Fritz, Charles E. and Harry B. Williams 1957. The human being in disasters: a research perspective. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 309: 42-51.

Barton, Alan H. 1963. Social Organization Under Stress: A Sociological Review of Disaster Studies. Disaster Study no. 17, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 208 pp.

Barton, Alan H. 1970. Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations. Doubleday, New York, 368 pp.

Bates, Frederick L. 1963. The Social and Psychological Consequences of a Natural Disaster: A Longitudinal Study of Hurricane Audrey. Disaster Study no. 18, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. 190 pp.

Anderson, Jon W. 1967. Cultural adaptation to threatened disaster. Human Organization 27: 298-307.

Burton, Ian, Robert W. Kates and Gilbert F. White 1968. The Human Ecology of Extreme Geophysical Events. Natural Hazards Research Working Paper no. 1. Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 29 pp.

Hewitt, Kenneth 1970. Probabilistic approaches to discrete natural events: a review and theoretical discussion. Economic Geography Supplement 46(2): 332-349.

Russell, Clifford S., 1970. Losses from natural hazards. Land Economics 46: 383-393.

Hewitt, Kenneth and Ian Burton 1971. The Hazardousness of Place: A Regional Ecology of Damaging Events. Research Publication no. 6, Department of Geography, University of Toronto. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 154 pp.

Kates, Robert W. 1971. Natural hazards in human ecological perspective: hypothesis and model. Economic Geography 47(3): 438-451.

White, Gilbert F. (ed.) 1974. Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global. Oxford University Press, New York, 288 pp.

Dynes, Russell R. 1975. The comparative study of disaster: a social organizational approach. Mass Emergencies 1: 21-31.

O'Keefe, Phil, Ken Westgate and Ben Wisner 1976. Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters. Nature 260: 566-567.

Haas, J. Eugene, Robert W. Kates and Martyn J. Bowden (eds) 1977. Reconstruction Following Disaster. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 331 pp.

Davis, Ian 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford Polytechnic Press, Oxford, 127 pp.

Burton, Ian, Robert W. Kates and Gilbert F. White 1978, 1993. The Environment as Hazard. First edn Oxford University Press, New York, 240 pp; Second edn Guilford Press, New York, 304 pp.

Timmerman, Peter 1981. Vulnerability, Resilience and the Collapse of Society. Environmental Monograph no. 1, Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, 42 pp.

Davis, Ian (ed.) 1981. Disasters and the Small Dwelling. Pergamon, Oxford, 220 pp.

Douglas, M. and A. Wildavsky 1982. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 224 pp.

Hewitt, Kenneth (ed.) 1983. Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology. Unwin-Hyman, London: 304 pp.

Hewitt, Kenneth 1983. The idea of calamity in a technocratic age. In K. Hewitt (ed.) Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology. Unwin-Hyman, London: 3-32.

Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans M. Ritter. Sage, London, 260 pp.

Blaikie, Piers, Terry Cannon, Ian Davis and Ben Wisner 1994, 2003. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters. Routledge, London, 320 pp.

Quarantelli, Enrico L. 1995. What is a disaster? International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 13(3): 221-229.

Horlick-Jones, Tom 1995. Modern disasters as outrage and betrayal. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 13(3): 305-315.

Quarantelli, Enrico L. 1997. Problematical aspects of the information/communication revolution for disaster planning and research: ten non-technical issues and questions. Disaster Prevention and Management 6(2): 94-106.

Quarantelli, Enrico L. (ed.) 1998. What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. Routledge, London, 312 pp.

Mileti, Dennis S. (ed.) 1999. Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. John Henry Press, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 351 pp.

Perrow, C. 1999. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (2nd edn). Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 386 pp.
or
Perrow, C. 2001. Accidents, normal. In N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes (eds) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Pergamon, Oxford. 33-38

Slovic, P. (ed.) 2000. The Perception of Risk. Risk, Society and Policy Series. Earthscan, London, 384 pp.

Stallings, Robert A. (ed.) 2002. Methods of Disaster Research. International Research Committee on Disasters Book Series no. 2. Xlibris, Philadelphia, 524 pp.

Perry, Ronald W. and Enrico L. Quarantelli (eds) 2005. What is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions. Xlibris Press, Philadelphia, 375 pp.

Rubin, C.B (ed.) 2012. Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2010 (2nd edn). CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 314 pp.

General science

Some works of more general science are particularly useful to disaster studies. Here is my selection.

Paine, Thomas 1794. The Age of Reason. Edition 2009, Truth Seeker Company, Escondido, California, 358 pp.

Kant, Immanuel 1798. The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten). Trans. Mary J. Gregor, Edition 1979, Amaris Books, New York, 221 pp.

Maslow, Abraham Harold 1943. A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review 50: 370-396.

Von Bertalanffy, K. Ludwig 1950. The theory of open systems in physics and biology. Science 111: 23-29.

Von Bertalanffy, K. Ludwig 1950. An outline of General Systems Theory. British Journal of Philosophical Sciences 1: 139-164.

Simon, Herbert A. 1956. Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review 63: 129-138.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962, 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 222 pp.

Simon, Herbert A. 1962. The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(6): 467-482.

Ackerman, Edward A. 1963. Where is a research frontier? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53(4): 429-440.

Harvey, David 1969. Scientific explanation: the model of natural science. Ch. 4. Explanation in Geography. Edward Arnold, London: 30-43.

Simon, Herbert A. 1978. On how to decide what to do. The Bell Journal of Economics 9(2): 494-507.

Explosions: A Curious Coincidence

 Source: Museum of London (see reference below).

At 6.52 pm on Friday 19 January 1917 a munitions factory exploded in Silvertown, a docklands district of east London. Fifty tonnes of TNT went up in a disaster that is still London's largest explosion. Seventy-three people were killed, 400 were injured, some critically, 900 properties (including 600 houses) were destroyed and 70,000 were damaged, including some in central London. The noise of the explosion was heard in many distant parts of southeast England. A gasometer in North Greenwich received the full force of the blast and released 200,000 m3 of gas in a massive fireball (Wikipedia 2017). Up to 1000 rescue workers were sent to the site. The explosion cost the British State £1.8 million, of which £10,173,595 was paid in compensation to third parties. Ten per cent of the compensation went to the owners of the TNT factory, who managed to restore part of the works to functionality.

The Museum of London has digitised and put on line 24 plate photographs of the damage, which were taken for insurance and litigation purposes by the contemporary photographer John H. Avery (Museum of London 2017).

This event is singular for two reasons. First, it is little known and unremembered (in London or elsewhere), even though there are two memorials to it. To be fair, London historians and some of the descendants of those who were killed did mark the centenary of the event. However, the explosion is seldom referred to in accounts of London's wartime or Edwardian history.

Of course, loss of life in civilian catastrophes that occur during war is not usually considered to be particularly newsworthy. Munitions have to be made in great haste, often by people with little training or expertise: the factory in Silvertown produced 10 tonnes of TNT a day, although with very poor risk management, according to the official enquiry into the disaster. During the First World War, about 600 people were killed in munitions factories in accidental explosions (Historic England 2017). During the Second World War, a farm was obliterated by an explosion in the English Midlands: that is to say, not merely all the buildings, but the fields as well. The incident passed almost without comment. One is put in mind of the greatest railway disaster of all time, at Balvano in southern Italy in 1944, where the death toll probably exceeded 1,000, and the event is virtually unknown (Barneschi 2005, 2014.).*

The second reason why the Silvertown explosion is worthy of comment here is because it has its centenary in the same year as that of the Halifax, Nova Scotia, ship explosion. In my earlier piece in this blog, I argued that the Halifax incident was the start of academic studies of disaster. The Silvertown event was the exact opposite. The official report into the explosion was not released to the public for almost 40 years. What a contrast!

*Since writing this, Dr Ilan Kelman has corrected me: 1,500 died when the 26 December 2004 tsunami swept a train off the tracks in Sri Lanka, so Balvano is "one of the two worst railway disasters".

Afterword

The 1917 Silvertown explosion ignited about 50 tonnes of TNT. The blast, which was heard 150 km away, smashed windows up to 13 km away. The Richard Montgomery contains almost 30 times as much TNT. What would it do to the windows of the Shard and other City skyscrapers, and what would be the effect upon people at street level?

References

Barneschi, G. 2005. Balvano 1944: i segreti di un disastro ferroviario ignorato. Testimonianze fra cronaca e storia. 1939-1945: seconda guerra mondiale. Mursia, Milano, 290 pp.

Barneschi, G. 1914. Balvano 1944. Indagine su un disastro rimosso. Edizione, Novecento, Libreria Editrice Goriziana, Gorizia, 339 pp.

Historic England 2017. First World War: accidental explosions. https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/first-world-war-home-front/what-we-already-know/land/first-world-war-accidental-explosions/ (accessed 4 February 2017)

Museum of London 2017. Silvertown explosion. http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/group/25204.html (accessed 4 February 2017)

Wikipedia 2017. Silvertown explosion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvertown_explosion (accessed 4 February 2017)