Disaster Planning and Emergency Management

Preliminary Lessons from the 'Costa Concordia' shipwreck

2012-01-16T15:51:00.003+01:00

Davos (CH), 16 January 2012. The Costa Concordia shipwreck offers some interesting observations about risk and its effect upon disaster and about evacuation. First, let us examine the question of what happened.

The Costa Concordia is a Concordia Class ship of 114,500 gross tonnage, 51,387 tonnes displacement. It was built in 2005 at Sestri Ponente, Liguria, Italy, and completed its maiden voyage in June 2006. It is owned by the UK-US company Carnival Corporation plc, the world's largest cruise ship operator. The ship was commanded by Captain Francesco Schettino, who joined Costa Cruises in 2002 and was made captain in 2006.

In the evening of Friday 13 January 2012 the Costa Concordia deviated from its regular programmed route through the Tyrrhenian Sea in order to make a close approach to Giglio, an island in the Tuscan Archipelago close to the Argentario Peninsula. Giglio is 23.8 sq. km in size, has a population of 1,458 and is economically dependent on fishing and tourism. The Costa Concordia had carried out a similar manoeuvre in August 2011, which led some people on the island to comment that it was dangerously close.

The alteration of course was not approved by the operating company and involved cancelling alarms and part of a pre-programmed route. At about 21.40 hrs CET while about 150 m from the coast of Giglio the ship struck a rock, which tore a rift about 70 m long and up to 48.8 m wide in port side of its hull (the Costa Concordia is 290.2 m in length). This caused the ship to decelerate rapidly from 15 to six knots and created a pronounced list as compartments below the waterline flooded. The ship then beached on a coastal shelf 37 m deep and less than 100 m from the coast. It was inclined at 60-70 degrees and about half-submerged.

There were 4,229 people on board, of whom about 1,000 were personnel from the multinational crew. The rest were passengers from different countries. They were evacuated over a period of less than two hours, mostly by life-raft but in a few cases by swimming ashore (and thus risking hypothermia). At the time of writing this, six bodies have been recovered and 24 passengers and four crew members are still missing, which amounts to a potential mortality of 0.5%. Sixty-four people were injured, mainly through broken limbs, cuts and abrasions and exposure or mild hypothermia.

The captain and first officer were detained by the police with the possibility that they would be indicted for manslaughter. At the time of writing efforts are underway to remove 2,380 tonnes of fuel oil from 17 double-hulled tanks and four other containers. If the oil escapes, serious damage could be done to sea-floor ecology in the vicinity of a marine reserve. Early indications are that the ship may be declared a constructive total loss, with a cost of about $500 million, and that Carnival Corporation will suffer a loss of earnings of $85-95 million in the current financial year, including the effect of the drop in value of its shares. Nevertheless, as I write negotiations are underway to conduct salvage and reflotation.

The following preliminary observations can be made on the basis of the incomplete evidence that is publicly available at the time of writing, less than three days after the event.

Risk taking. It appears that the unauthorised approach to Giglio involved substantial risk to the safety of the ship, and probably more risk than was in any way acceptable. One wonders what procedural mechanisms existed in the company to limit or avoid such risks? The technical mechanisms appeared to have been satisfactory but could be overridden. It is as well to remember that an interview with Captain Smith of the Titanic, shortly before its last voyage, recorded him as saying that his career had been distinguished by how uneventful it had been. Maritime risk is not a continuum but a spiky phenomenon, and one that can harbour great surprises (if I may be forgiven an instant of inadvertent levity).

Alarm. The first sign of problems involved a "boom and groan" noise and a substantial jolt as the ship rapidly decelerated, which also toppled or threw objects around on board. Apparently, passengers did not raise the alarm by calling external authorities for about an hour. In the meantime they were advised that there had been an electrical fault. Quite probably, passengers and crew experienced normalcy bias, the desire to believe the least threatening hypothesis. In some respects, the situation was analogous to that of the MS Estonia, which sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994 with the loss of 851 lives, 85 per cent of those on board. Over a 45-minute period, the Estonia listed 30-40 degrees before listing 90 degrees, which made evacuation from lower decks impossible. Listing was rather less on the Costa Concordia, but it nevertheless complicated movement aboard the ship. The first advice to passengers appears to have been to go to their cabins. This highlights the management difficulties experienced in the 'hiatus period' when managers do not have enough information to determine a reliable strategy and thus tend to require passive behaviour from those people they have to manage.

Evacuation. Comprehensive training meant that procedures were clear. However, despite drills, passengers had no experience of evacuation and some underestimated the risk and behaved inappropriately. A degree of chaos is inevitable in such conditions as listing complicates the launch of life rafts. Unlike the Titanic, which was grossly undersupplied with lifeboats, the Costa Concordia had some redundancy in its life raft accommodation. Nevertheless, it is difficult to launch 150-170 people into the sea from a severely listing ship. An amateur video shot by one of the evacuees was widely circulated in the mass media with the title "Lifeboat panic caught on film." However, when one watches the video clip, it tends to show the opposite, and thus confirm the absence of panic rather than its prevalence, as in so many previous disasters. Nevertheless, as fear of entrapment is one of the principal causes of panic, the conditions were ripe for it to break out, as it did on the Estonia when listing became chronic and movement was inhibited. An element of luck intervened: the ship beached on a coastal shelf in calm weather. In stormier conditions it could have slid into deeper water and sunk completely without the opportunity to evacuate almost all people on board. In valediction, there does not appear to be evidence of discriminatory evacuation which might have put vulnerable people at risk, even though at least two of the dead were senior citizens of advanced age.

Management of the aftermath. Costa Cruises appears to have adopted a standard business continuity crisis management approach based on comprehensive communication. The company distanced itself from the decision-making process that led to the disaster. It will require substantial resources in order to deal with claims: millions of euros of money and assets were abandoned aboard. There is thus a need for a system rather like the one developed by SAS Airlines and promoted by IATA for dealing with the administrative needs after an air crash—but on a larger scale.

Shore-based civil protection and coastguard forces appear to have acted well, although as in many such cases it took vital time for the enormity of the situation to be appreciated in full. The management reliance on the Prefecture of Grosseto (the province in which the disaster occurred) confirms the persistence of the 1990s model of civil protection in Italy, despite the reforms intended in the Bassanini decree-law of 1998, articles 107 and 108 of which shifted the balance of power to the regions.

Media response. Early reports reflected some of the uncertainties garnered from a massof differing perceptions of the event. Whether the crew acted efficiently inthe evacuation or not, whether the alarm was sounded in the right manner ornot, whether there was panic and how much danger was involved in reaching theshore, and whether the captain abandoned ship before some of the passengers andcrew are all examples of matters that were not reported reliably, perhaps withsome reason. Despite the purveyance of conflicting information, the reportingwas relatively free of the usual distortions. This may have been because theend result of the disaster was much less severe than it could have been if theship had, for example, sunk in deeper water. Hence, the pervasive desire toblame was muted in this case. Human error undoubtedly played a part, negligencemay have been a factor, but there was no great desire to accuse. There might have been in a more severe disaster, andin that case accusations would undoubtedly have been launched more freely.Nonetheless, the media's incessant emphasis on 'human interest' storiesprovided an unbalanced overview of the difficulties of evacuation, much skewedtowards the extreme conditions related by a minority of people who had arelatively hard time.

Conclusion. No doubt other lessons will emerge, and these lessons will be qualified by new information. In the meantime, in one respect the Costa Concordia disaster reminds one of the Buncefield oil storage depot explosion and fire in Hertfordshire, England in 2005: out of the most tranquil situation, where routine conditions have prevailed since anyone can remember, can be born an extraordinary scenario, and perhaps an apocalyptic one. This is what 'disaster risk' can mean.

Addition 20-1-2012. Information subsequently released has tended to confirm the hypothesis of human error that overrode technical protection mechanisms and automated systems. Besides the implication of negligence, three aspects of this disaster remain particularly strinking. The first is the procedural failures regarding evacuation. Passengers (by then wearing lifejackets) were initially advised to return to their cabins. This could have led to high mortality if the ship had sunk in deep water. Moreover, opportunities to abandon ship before it started listing were wasted. Secondly, many other instances have come to light of large cruise liners, including the Costa Concordia herself, coming unacceptably close to Italian coasts. It is notable that legislation has to be enacted (by emergency decree) rather than relying on the cruise operators to excercise normal prudence and caution. Thirdly, statements made public by numerous protagonists, from ships cooks to managing directors, have been so contradictory that it is clear that the truth about this incident is in short supply.

The Costs of Relief in International Disasters

2011-12-19T13:25:00.003+01:00

Does rescue and medical intervention in foreign disasters cost too much? Is it effective and efficient? It is remarkable how little debate there is about these questions and how few data are available on which to base one's judgements.

In assessing costs, it is necessary to distinguish between search and rescue (SAR) and urban search and rescue (USAR). The former includes mountain and sea rescue, lost climbers, search for lost children and Alzheimer's patients and is usually focussed on one or two individuals, or a single boat. USAR involves searching damaged buildings after earthquakes, explosions and structural collapses.

SAR costs are highly variable. The cost of using helicopters depends on the type and availability of the aircraft, its range and crewing requirements (from a single pilot to a full medical team, copilot and winchman). In general it is around €2,500 per hour of search.

International USAR may involve travel over very long distances (for example from Taiwan to Haiti). It may also involve one or two teams of 58 members, up to 28 tonnes of equipment, and possibly also two or three rescue dogs (FEMA 1996). USAR teams inscribed in the UN register INSARAG are required to maintain 72 hours' total autonomy wherever they work, which necessitates bringing food and water supplies with them. However, it is very difficult to be autonomous with regard to local transportation in a foreign country.

In the USA a USAR team costs about $1.8-$2.2 million per year to maintain. For accredited teams, the US Federal Government contributes about $1 million per task force per year, a total of $28 million. Although in 20 years the cost to US taxpayers went up seven times, they have fallen back recently (Bea 2010, p. 1).

The number of foreign rescuers that arrive in a disaster area after a major, internationally declared catastrophe usually varies from 1,200 to about 2,300, with a mean somewhere around 1,600. Almost no one arrives within the first 24-36 hours and almost all usually arrive within 72 hours. On occasion delays have been experienced by failure to get through immigration and quarantine, or by lack of transport on the ground. The teams usually stay for 4-7 days.

The "golden period" for rescuing trapped survivors is 6-12 hours after a sudden impact disaster that causes buildings to collapse (and definitely well within the first 24 hours). However, most foreign rescuers arrive later than this, and the number of people rescued is usually very small. The teams are thus restricted to recovering bodies from the rubble. In Bam the 57 members of Rapid-UK rescued no one at all. In Haiti, 134 people were rescued (bearing in mind that the death toll was probably in excess of 250,000 and no one ever counted the plethora of injured people). Of these 134 people only nine were rescued after the fourth day. Yet the EU alone mobilised 12 USAR teams, and at least 24 others arrived from different countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Whilst one is of course grateful that anyone was rescued, one is forced to conclude that overwhelming inputs thus produced very small results. Similarly, 40 USAR teams participated in the response to the Bam, Iran, earthquake of 2003, but only five of them arrived within the first 24 hours (Abolghasemi et al. 2006).

The maximum survival time for an uninjured person trapped under rubble is 14-15 days, but the proportion of people who last more than five days is absolutely insignificant. In the Tanghsan, China, earthquake of 1976, the worst such disaster in the 20th century, 5,500 people were rescued on the first day, but by the fifth day there were only 34 new survivors.

The cost of sending teams across the globe and putting them to work for a week is seldom, if ever, quoted. Rumour has it that the cost per life saved is about US$1 million, although accurate estimates have, to my knowledge, never been made. Clearly, if all search and rescue could be conducted by well-equipped, numerous, well trained local forces, then costs would be very much smaller. However, it is as well to remember that in the response to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 135 rescuers died, 65 of them when searching confined spaces that flooded (Casper and Murphy 2003, p. 367). Safety training and personal protective equipment are thus absolutely necessary. In Mexico City, as elsewhere, four fifths of survivors were rescued within one day of the disaster (Olson and Olson 1987).

A second problem concerns foreign field hospitals (FFHs). In the aftermath of the Bam earthquake, the estimated cost of deploying 14 foreign field hospitals for an average of two months each was $12 million, or about 40 per cent of the cost of rebuilding Bam's two damaged and unserviceable hospitals. Deployment was more rapid than it had been in the Gujarat earthquake two years previously (24-48 hours as against 5-7 days), but nevertheless, by the time the first field hospitals were active, injured patients had either died or been airlifted by medivac to other cities. The field hospitals were used to provide routine medical care in substitution for the damaged permanent medical structures. Hence, it is hardly surprising that when Von Schreeb et al (2008) looked at four major mass-casualty disasters, they found evidence of substantial over-supply of medical aid and rates of utilisation of field hospitals that fell below 50 per cent. In the final analysis, the logistical costs of deploying field hospitals may be so high that they are sometimes left behind at the end of operations and donated to the host country--i.e. written off.

The upshot of these considerations about USAR and FFHs is that there is no substitute for resilient, local rescue and medical response to disasters. The costs of foreign intervention are very high, the benefits are small and from this point of view the international relief system is extremely inefficient.

References

Abolghasemi, H., M.H. Radfar, M. Khatami, M. S. Nia, A. Amid and S.M. Briggs 2006. International medical response to a natural disaster: lessons learned from the Bam earthquake experience. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 21(3): 141-148.

Bea, K. 2010. Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces: Facts and Issues. Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, 41 pp.

Casper, J. and R.R. Murphy 2003. 2003. Human–robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Part B: Cybernetics 33(3): 367-385.

FEMA 1996. Technical Rescue Program Development Manual. FA-159. US Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, DC, 252 pp.

Olson, R.S. and R.A. Olson 1987. Urban heavy rescue. Earthquake Spectra 3(4): 645-658.

Von Schreeb, J., L. Riddez, H. Samnegσrd, H. Rosling and C. de Ville de Goyet 2008. Foreign field hospitals in the recent sudden-impact disasters in Iran, Haiti, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 23(2): 144-153.

Learning Lessons from Crises and Disasters

2011-11-21T11:38:00.007+01:00

Lessons Learned?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines learning as the acquisition of "knowledge of skill ... through study or experience or by being taught". In defining 'lesson' it distinguishes between "a thing learned" and "a thing that serves as a warning or encouragement". The concept of 'lessons learned' is widely used in disaster risk reduction, a field that offers many opportunities to learn from practical experience and theoretical study. The term has been used in a variety of different contexts, which can be given the following summary classification:-

General lessons from major events, particularly large disasters of international importance. Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf of Mexico states in August 2005, led to a significant number of studies that collected observations on how to improve resilience in the affected area (e.g. White 2007).
Specific lessons from major events, usually derived by concentrating on particular sectors or disciplines, such as the engineering response to building failure, or the response to disaster of psychologists (e.g. Schumacher et al. 2006).
Lessons obtained as a result of monitoring the practice and outcomes of drills and exercises, particularly those designed to test multi-agency response to incidents and disasters (e.g. Beedasy and Ramloll 2010; Fitzgerald et al. 2003).
Lessons derived over time from cumulative experience of particular phenomena, practices or problems, such hospital response to repeated mass-casualty events, or organising services to deal with the recurrent threat of pandemic influenza (e.g. Clancy et al. 2009).
Lessons that arise from particular situations, especially those in which actions taken could have been improved, and those in which innovations were tried for the first time, such as interventions in the Bam (Iran) earthquake of 2003 or the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, or the development of new scenarios for earthquake disaster response (e.g. Plafker and Galloway 1989).
In the operation of technological systems, especially those denoted 'high reliability systems' (such as avionics), the occurrence of technical faults and human error has been the focus of attempts to learn lessons and see that the faults or errors do not occur again. Such are the mutations in technology and its operation that there are frequent opportunities to repeat this exercise as the context of faults and errors continually mutates (Krausmann et al 2011).

Despite the widespread use of the term "lessons learned", considerable doubt remains about the extent to which the lessons truly are learned. As Figure 1 illustrates, it is perfectly possible to recognise that particular phenomena, events or situations contain information that could contribute to better practice in the future, but it is entirely a different matter to do something about it. In the worst cases, the lessons go unrecognised. Hardly better is the situation in which they are recorded, archived and forgotten, without any attempt to incorporate them into practice and thus benefit from them.

Figure 1. Disaster risk reduction and "lessons learned".

As a result of these considerations, the test of a 'lesson learned' in is that it should contribute in some way to the solution of problems--in this field, to disaster risk reduction and the improvement of resilience (Figure 2). There must therefore be a direct connection between the existence of a lesson, its recognition by practitioners, decision makers or policy makers, and tangible improvements in practice, decisions or policies.

Figure 2. The "lessons learned chain".

As Figure 2 shows, the process of learning lessons ought to be fairly linear and straightforward. Events and circumstances reveal opportunities to learn and bone fide observers profit by these as part of the common endeavour to improve both decision making and working practices. That is the case in many situations, but it is far from a universal modus operandi. There are, as noted above, many opportunities to learn lessons, and learning should be a constant process which contributes to the development of individual people and the organisations to which they belong. However, there are serious impediments. For example, the United Kingdom has had an Inspectorate of Railways (HMRI) since 1840. It has had a reputation for penetrating, impartial investigation and the public conduct of enquiries and publication of their results. However, most of the findings of HMRI have been given in the form of non-binding recommendations for greater safety, and many of these have taken years, or decades, to be absorbed by legislation. Moreover, the UK railway industry has had an equally long history of resisting costly innovation, even when it would undoubtedly save lives.

Accidental or wilful ignorance are only two of many reasons why lessons are not learned. Many lessons are identified without a context of risk analysis and benefit-cost assessment. While the costs of innovation are the easier part to assess, risks and benefits are often elusive quantities, especially as they tend to depend on perception as much as reality. Hence, the lesson may be that "lives can be saved by adopting a particular practice", but this statement does not in itself indicate whether it is expedient to do so in terms of money spent per life saved, given competition for funds from other sources. In other situations the innovation may be prohibitively expensive, as is often the case for retrofitting buildings in areas of high seismicity.

Another reason for lack of adoption is political expediency. An innovation may make technical sense, but be politically unappetising or unacceptable, perhaps because it is unlikely to garner votes. The negative profile of civil protection, which is fundamentally about emergencies and disasters, is one reason why it rarely enjoys priority in policy making. This could, of course, be turned into a positive bid for more security rather than the negative image of yet more disasters, but politicians have commonly been reluctant to follow that road. The result is the "no votes in sewage syndrome": wastewater treatment is essential to public health, but not an attractive part of a policy platform.

An extension of this problem is cultural rejection of disaster risk reduction. Where human cultures are fatalistic, politicians are unresponsive to the need for greater public safety and there is little public debate of the issues, the terrain is not fertile for learning the lessons of adverse events. If the collective memory of disaster is short, there is even less scope for making the enduring changes needed in order to create resilience, and the result is the perpetuation of vulnerability. This was very evident in, for example, the flash floods and debris flows that killed 19 people in Liguria, northwest Italy, in October and November 2011. In effect, nothing happened that was not well forecast and that had not happened before. Poor official and public response to the events when they occurred compounded the problem, which stemmed from unwise land use and failure to organise adequately against the threats of floods and mass movements.

These considerations indicate that the process of learning lessons about crises and disasters requires a much broader approach than simply accumulating observations on errors, faults and poor quality responses on the one hand, and good and best practice on the other. Moreover, what is 'best' practice under one set of conditions may be less than optimal in another setting. There is thus a need for work that evaluates what is a "lesson to be learned" in the light of its potential to be transplanted from previous conditions to future ones, and, of course, its ability to contribute to better practice, greater resilience and reduced disaster risk. This requires evaluation of cultural and political factors that inhibit or encourage innovation. It necessitates judgement on whether there is universal or merely local value in adopting a new practice or making a modification in existing rules, norms, plans or procedures. In the final analysis it may also require benefit-cost analysis of any changes that are contemplated.

It is often said that we tend to prepare for the last disaster rather than the next one. Although there is much value in learning the lessons of history, in order not to be condemned to repeat its mistakes, any assessment of past or current practice should take account of how it can contribute in a future characterised by constant change in circumstances and the need to adapt to new realities.

One of the most central issues in the process of learning lessons is the relationship between individual learning and the acquisition of knowledge by the organisations in which individuals function. This will be examined in the next section.

Organisational Learning

In analysing the communication processes it is opportune to use the hierarchical classification provided by IFRCRCS (2005) and sometimes attributed in origin to the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. At the lowest level of the DIKW pyramid, data are basic facts and statistics with little ontological relationship between them. Information involves the description of physical and social situations by combining and interpreting quantities of data. Knowledge refers to the understanding of how things function (or should function). Finally, wisdom is the ability to make decisions on the basis of principles, experience and knowledge (Figure 3).

Figure 3. the DIKW pyramid (IFRCRCS 2005 and other sources).

Some of the processes inherent in this classification occur in isolation as individuals work alone, but many take place in collective situations of social interaction. As Elkjaer (2003) observed, the individual and the organisation in which he or she works are bound together by power relations, such that there is no net distinction between solitary and collective knowledge. Nonetheless, over the two decades 1991-2011 considerable progress has been made in advancing the field of organizational knowledge. Occupational psychologists, management specialists, operations researchers and economists have all been involved in this multi-disciplinary effort to understand how organisations and their members acquire, utilise and retain information.

In an earlier work Polanyi (1966) classified human knowledge into two categories. “Explicit” or codified knowledge refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language. On the other hand, “tacit” knowledge has a personal quality, which makes it hard to formalize and communicate. Nonaka (1994) considered the processes of interchange between the two sources of knowledge and formulated an epistemological-ontological model to characterise them. Spender (1996) noted that, following Wittgenstein, knowledge is composed of theoretical statements whose meanings and practical implications depend on how they are used and in what context that takes place.

In a further development, Lam (2000) broadened the explicit-tacit dichotomy to four categories of knowledge: embrained refers to knowledge that is dependent on an individual's conceptual skills and cognitive abilities; embodied knowledge is derived from practical action and experience; encoded knowledge is conveyed by signs and symbols; and embedded denotes the collective form of tacit knowledge found in organisational routines and shared norms (Figure 4).

Figure 4. A classification of organisational learning (Lam 2000).

Huber (1991) considered the acquisition, distribution and interpretation of knowledge in the light of an organisation's collective memory. He identified the sources of knowledge as follows:-

· remembering and codifying experience

· research-based learning and searching

· vicarious learning ('second-hand' acquisition of knowledge)

· storing and retrieving information

· scanning

· performance monitoring and evaluation

· organised self-appraisal

· experimentation.

In this context we can distinguish between enduring and perishable knowledge. The former includes fundamental concepts and procedures, consensus knowledge and information that reinforces, sustains and maintains existing relationships and practices. The latter comprises poorly collected and conserved 'transient' data and observations and may be the fruit of the surge caused by demand for knowledge during periods of an organisation's imperative to adapt to rapid and profound change.

Not all knowledge is beneficial. In studying information overload, March (1991) found that too much information can inhibit learning processes. Kane and Alavi (2007) discovered that although information technology can be beneficial to fast learners, it can retard the progress of people who absorb information slowly. Moreover, Simon (1991) added his concept of 'bounded rationality' in an analysis of the limitations of organisational knowledge gathering.

Besides these limitations, the field of organizational knowledge is rich in dichotomies. The primary one is between individual and social knowledge, but others are between traditional and affective knowledge (Weber); facts and values (Simon); optimising and satisficing (Simon again); objective knowledge of bureaucracies and cultural knowledge of clans (Ouchi 1979); objective and tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966); and incremental and radical learning (March 1991). The process of knowledge acquisition in disasters forces the distinction between enduring and perishable information, as the latter includes knowledge that may disappear if it is not collected at certain key times.

A pattern is thus emerging in how organizations learn from their experiences and their mechanisms of gathering information. However, there is a serious lack of research on how this relates to emergencies, crises, disasters and other extreme situations. According to Lampel et al. (2009), if the impact on the organization is low, reinterpretive learning tends to occur. Lant and Mezias (1992) looked at the roles of both leadership and organisational adaptation in relation to the learning process. However, none of this adds up to a clear picture of exactly how organizations and their members acquire, store, share and utilise information in crises, how they do or do not transform it into knowledge, and what forces act to preserve or delete that knowledge.

In order truly to learn lessons about crises and disasters, theories of organisational knowledge need to be adapted to the special case of learning in and about crisis situations. Organisations need to be studied by developing a learning taxonomy that includes their type (e.g. 'blue-light' services, public administrations, civil society organisations, citizens' groups), size, competencies, experience and orientation. Organisational culture needs to be studied using models developed by anthropologists (e.g. Brislin 1984) and adapted for use in crisis situations (e.g. Alexander 2000).

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, U.K., and Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

Beedasy, J. and R. Ramloll 2010. Lessons learned from a pandemic influenza triage exercise in a 3D interactive multiuser virtual learning environment—Play2Train. Journal of Emergency Management 8(4): 53-61.

Brislin, R.W. 1980. Cross-cultural research methods: strategies, problems, applications. In I. Altman, A. Rapoport and J.F: Wohwill (eds) Human Behavior and Environment, Vol. 4, Environment and Culture. Plenum Press, New York: 47-82.

Clancy, T., C. Neuwirth and G. Bukowski 2009. Lessons learned in implementing a 24/7 public health call center in response to H1N1 in the state of New Jersey. American Journal of Disaster Medicine 4(5): 253-260.

Elkjaer, B. 2003. Organizational learning: 'the third way'. Organizational Learning and Knowledge: 5th International Conference, 30 May-2 June 2003, Lancaster, UK, 18 pp.

Fitzgerald, D.J., M.D. Sztajnkrycer and T.J. Crocco 2003. Chemical weapon functional exercise – Cincinnati: observations and lessons learned from a “typical medium-sized” city’s response to simulated terrorism utilizing weapons of mass destruction. Public Health Reports 118: 205-214.

Huber, G.P. 1991. Organizational learning: the contributing processes and the literatures. Organization Science 2(1): 88-115.

IFRCRCS 2005. World Disasters Report: Focus on Information in Disasters. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva, 251 pp.

Kane, G.C. and M. Alavi 2007. Information technology and organizational learning: an investigation of exploration and exploitation processes. Organization Science 18(5): 796-812.

Krausmann, E., E. Renni, M. Campedel and V. Cozzani 2011. Industrial accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning: lessons learned from a database analysis. Natural Hazards 59(1): 285-300.

Lam, A. 2000. Tacit knowledge, organizational learning and societal institutions: an integrated framework. Organization Studies 21: 487-513.

Lampel, J., J. Shamsie and Z. Shapira 2009. Experiencing the improbable: rare events and organizational learning. Organization Science 20(5): 835-845.

Lant, T.K. and S.J. Mezias 1992. An organisational learning model of convergence and reorientation. Organizational Science 3(1): 47-71.

March, J.G. 1991. Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organisation Science 2(1): 71-87.

Nonaka, I. 1994. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science 5(1): 14-37.

Ouchi, W.G. 1979. A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control

mechanisms. Management Science 25: 833-847.

Plafker, G and Galloway, J.P., eds. 1989. Lessons learned from the Loma Prieta, California, earthquake of October 17, 1989. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1045, 48 pp.

Polanyi, M. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Routledge, London, 128 pp.

Schumacher, J.A., S.F. Coffey, D.T. Elkin and G. Norquist 2006. Post-Katrina mental health care in Mississippi: lessons learned. The Behavior Therapist 29(6): 124-127.

Simon, H.A. 1991. Bounded rationality and organisational learning. Organization Science 2(1): 125-134.

Spender, J-C. 1996. Organizational knowledge, learning and memory: three concepts in search of a theory. Journal of Organizational Change Management 9(1): 63-78.

White, G.W. 2007. Katrina and other disasters: lessons learned and lessons to teach: introduction to the special series. Journal of Disability Policy Studies 17(4): 194-195.

Looting

2011-08-10T09:40:00.003+02:00

Looting, the very public theft of private property, is probably the most contentious of the so-called 'myths' of disaster. It has been misidentified or greatly exaggerated in many emergency situations. Moreover, it is often hypothesised as part of scenarios in which, in reality, it is unlikely to be a significant factor. It is usually treated as symptomatic of anarchy, the destructive side of the human character and the degradation or spontaneous abandonment of social norms. But while looting is refreshingly absent from many disasters, or at least is scarcely important in comparison with positive behaviour, it remains a factor in some events and, after years of study, it still demands clarification.

In 1968 sociologists Henry Quarantelli and Russell Dynes recognised that there is a difference between the causes and patterns of looting in disasters and civil disturbances (Dynes and Quarantelli 1968). Over the following two years they elaborated models of looting with particular reference to situations in which it has been prevalent, most of which were riots and few of which were natural disasters (Quarantelli and Dynes 1968, 1970). Indeed, with regard to the latter, there probably have to be specific preconditions of instability in the social fabric for looting to be a factor at all. Thus, after the Armenia (Colombia) earthquake of 1999, residents looted food stores and supermarkets. This was both a protest at the inefficiency of the Colombian Government's relief effort and a move to satisfy a basic need for sustenance (Brancati 2007). It was not a set of random acts of vandalism. Moreover, it probably stemmed from pre-existing instabilities in society, such as lack of faith in the role of government as the true and responsive embodiment of the common will.

According to Quarantelli and Dynes (1968), looting in disasters tends to be stealthy (although it clearly was nothing of the kind in the Colombian city of Armenia). In civil disturbances it follows a more open and complex model. In this, the first stage is marked by attacks on symbols of authority and there then follows the mass redefinition of property rights. The looting that occurs after this is a collective, participatory action in which pillaging tends to be more important than acquisition of goods: property norms have been redefined.

Dynes and Quarantelli (1968) broadened their model into three stages, in which the first is largely symbolic, the second is systematic and organised and the third is a free-for-all. The middle stage involves co-operation between those elements of society who wish to profit from the anarchy by organising theft and those who are doing it for the thrill. In the third stage, plundering becomes an acceptable, if transient, social norm.

Interestingly, Quarantelli and Dynes found that there is no simple correlation between the level of poverty or disadvantage of a person is and his or her propensity to engage in looting. Research in the 1990s (Wortley 1998) even went so far as to suggest that looters tend to be relatively well educated and adept at communication. Moreover, other work (Grabosky 1996) found that there appears to be no discernable difference in the average profiles of people who do and do not take part in rioting and looting.

Research conducted in the 1990s by sociologists and criminologists came up with new models. Bohstedt (1994) disaggregated the context of riots into the physical situation, the tactical conditions, any pre-history of similar incidents, prevailing social relationships, the local culture of norms and expectations, the political context of previous conflict, and the structural distribution of political power.

As long ago as 1969, Zimbardo had proposed a theory of deindividuation, in which individual responsibility for one's actions disappears amid impulsive mass behaviour that is dominated by crowd dynamics. Self-control disappears with it. In his contribution, Forsyth (1990) added that arousal is an important condition for the emergence of deindividuation. Turner and Killian (1972) developed emergent norm theory, in which crowds adapt to changing circumstances and their members conform to the developing trend of mass behaviour. Deindividuation is characterised by uninhibited behaviour, but strategic interaction theory suggests that a person's payoffs depend on what other people do at the scene, which can change a person's estimate of the costs and benefits of participating (Miller 1999). Bohstedt (1994) considered imitative riots and saw them as a communication process which he termed 'chronic contagion'.

In all of this research there are several points to bear in mind. The first is that natural disasters and civil disturbances such as riots tend not to generate the same kinds and scales of looting--indeed, the former might not generate any at all, and what occurs tends to be overshadowed by, or even (paradoxically) linked to, Barton's (1970) 'therapeutic community'. The second is that theories of rioting and looting can be divided into those based on association and communication, and those that require dissociation of the participants and a greater level of spontaneity. The third point is that looting can be purposeful or aimless. In disasters and riots that are a response to specific grievances, the purposeful kind dominates: i.e., looters want to make a point to the authorities. Aimless looting bears out Bohstedt's (1994) observation that the circumstances and dynamics of riots are not linearly related. In synthesis, the likelihood, occurrence and severity of riots cannot, it seems, be predicted from levels of social deprivation (Forsyth 1990). Hence, it is not easy to apply sociological analysis to situations dominated by social tension.

Rioting and looting occurred widely throughout England in early August 2011. The official response was seen by the general (non-rioting) public to be inadequate and to have let a bad situation degenerate into the uncontrolled proliferation of violence and anarchy. Suddenly the underclass had shed their mantle of invisibility and were up in arms. In terms of emergency management, there may have been a failure to create adequate planning scenarios based on similar events in the past and in other places, notably in Paris in October and November 2005. Similar inadequacies can be seen in the response to the bombing and shooting spree carried out in Norway on 22 July 2011 by Anders Behring Breivik.

It is important not to overstate the effects of the English case. In the Detroit race riots of 1967, some 2,700 shops were looted (Quarantelli and Dynes 1968), far more than in England in 2011. However, the images and accounts of immoral and criminal behaviour in the latter case were striking. Moreover, the dilemmas of crowd control were all too apparent in the operational shortcomings of the forces of order. Nonetheless, much ill-informed comment appeared, especially in foreign news media which did not take the trouble to read detailed accounts of the riots and thus tended to attribute them to deteriorated race relations. In reality they are a clear artefact of unfettered robber capitalism in which any form of social contract has been replaced with commercial profiteering that does much to increase the gap in wealth and opportunities from successful people and those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Small wonder that the latter rebel.

My last point is my most important one. What can be learned for disaster studies from the English looting spree is clearly rather limited, as circumstances obviously differ. However, the social study of disaster has been predicated for decades on the assumption, indeed the affirmation, of the therapeutic community--at least as it exists in the heat of the moment. Models based on the breakdown of society have been labelled as "Hollywood myths" (Mitchell et al. 2000). Whereas the English social fabric is emphatically not going to break down as a result of the August 2011 riots, it is as well to remember that society has its darker side. The moral consensus generated by floods and earthquakes, for example, is not necessarily as deep as social scientists have tended to assume. The answer for students of disaster is to pay more attention to the context of events.

References

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

Bohstedt, J. 1994. The dynamics of riots: escalation and diffusion/contagion. In M. Potegal and J.F. Knutson (eds) The Dynamics of Aggression: Biological and Social Processes in Dyads and Groups. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey: 257-303.

Brancati, D. 2007. Political aftershocks: the impact of earthquakes on intrastate conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution 51(5): 715-743.

Dynes, R.R. and E.L. Quarantelli 1968. What looting in civil disturbances really means. Trans-Action 5: 9-14.

Forsyth, D.R. 1990. Group Dynamics (2nd edn). Brooks-Cole, Pacific Grove, California.

Grabosky, P. 1996. Unintended consequences of crime prevention. Crime Prevention Studies 5: 25-56.

Miller, R.A. 1999. Regime type, strategic interaction, and the diversionary use of force. Journal of Conflict Resolution 43(3): 388-402.

Mitchell, J.T., D.S.K. Thomas, A.A. Hill and S.L. Cutter 2000. Catastrophe in reel life versus real life: perpetuating disaster myth through Hollywood films. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18(3): 383-402.

Quarantelli, E.L. and R.R. Dynes 1968. Looting in civil disorders: an index of social change. American Behavioral Scientist 5: 131-141.

Quarantelli, E.L. and R.R. Dynes 1970. Property norms and looting: their patterns in community crises. Phylon 31(2): 168-182.

Wortley, R. 1998. A two-stage model of situational crime prevention. Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention 7: 173-188.

Zimbardo, P.G. 1969. The human choice: individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W.J. Arnold and D. Levine (eds) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 17. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Disasters, Government and Governance

2011-07-20T17:46:00.004+02:00

On theory

The purpose of disaster research is to seek the truth, not to legitimise particular actions, decisions or phenomena. This may seem too obvious to need stating, but in reality there are cases in which research has distorted, rather than clarified, the image of reality.

The root of the problem lies in people's motivations, and what the researcher assumes about them. In an ideal world, the threat or impact of disaster would move people to act for the common good. Thus they would respond to, or help create, Barton's 'therapeutic community' (Barton 1970). Disaster would reinforce the commonwealth, instead of promoting the interests of its individual members. In reality, motivations vary and hence decisions and their outcomes cannot be analysed in terms of a single modus operandi. For fear of appearing biassed, disaster researchers are usually reluctant to attribute unethical motives to particular decision makers, or even to question their ethics (Beatley 1989). However, not all protagonists of disaster response and disaster risk reduction act ethically, or at least their view of ethics is not that which a bona fide researcher would be likely to agree with.

It is in any case difficult to assess both motivations and corruption. The clandestine and illegal character of the latter means that information is hard to come by and the process of acquiring it can be dangerous. Thus surveys of global corruption are restricted to compiling a 'corruption perception index', rather than any concrete measure of the phenomenon (Transparency International 2009). However, the disruption caused by disasters offers a great opportunity to both organised and casual criminals to subvert legitimate activities. In extreme cases of political or economic scarcity, this may be the only way to get things done. In no case is it a sustainable way of managing recovery from disasters.

This essay will use the case of the L'Aquila (Italy) earthquake of 2009 as an example of how conventional analysis based on the idea of a common social motivation can distort the interpretation of events and decisions. We live in an age that often prizes individualism over the common good. The concept of disaster as a social leveller (at least in the first instance) has had a long history but has been vanquished by events, especially Hurricane Katrina, a paragon of unequal opportunity (Germany 2007). Social inequality is not merely a matter of access to resources, power and publicity (Tierney 2006), it is also a question of motives, as the following example demonstrates.

The L'Aquila (Italy) earthquake of 2009 as a case history

On 6 April 2009 an earthquake of magnitude 6.2 occurred in the Abruzzo Region of central Italy, with epicentre close to the regional capital city of L'Aquila (population 73,000). Some 308 people were killed, 1,500 were injured (202 of them seriously), 67,000 were rendered homeless and 100,000 buildings suffered major damage. In brief, the response involved committing 94,000 volunteers and copious resources of the Italian state to the relief effort, housing 40,000 people in tents and hotels and then building more than 50 complexes of transitional housing, about 40 per cent of which consisted of base-isolated (i.e. anti-seismic) multi-storey buildings. According to official sources, the cost of the latter averaged €280,607 per dwelling unit (€3,875 per sq. m), including the costs of urbanisation and landscaping. In the meantime, buttressing went ahead in the 15 town centres and one city centre (L'Aquila) that had been cordoned off for reasons of public safety, but reconstruction stagnated. During the first year after the earthquake, four million tonnes of rubble remained in situ and the process of repairing buildings was largely restricted to those that were only lightly damaged.

Various aspects of the Italian Government's strategy for responding to the L'Aquila earthquake are singular and perhaps debatable (Alexander 2011). They can be questioned in terms of logic, efficiency, outcome, economy, fiscal prudence and general efficacy.

Immediate relief

The immediate response to the earthquake involved directing a huge quantity of relief resources to the area, including 94,000 volunteers, more than one for every survivor. While this solved the problems of search, rescue and care of the survivors, it did not do so efficiently and would not work in a larger earthquake of a kind, which, unfortunately will one day be inevitable further down the peninsula or in Sicily. Such a strategy contributed nothing to the future ability to ration disaster response resources in cases of scarcity. It is akin to the doctrine of overwhelming force (Lantis and Moskowitz 2008)

Transitional housing

Survivors were accommodated in tents for 6-7 months and then transferred to transitional housing in wooden prefabricated buildings or steel-framed two- or three-storey blocks (the base-isolated housing). Initially, they paid no rent and were given all necessary furnishings and fitments. Some of the complexes were built on expropriated conservation land, and others on prime farmland. Some are on floodable terrain, others on hillsides. Some are susceptible to winter weather hazards and all had a degree of isolation from basic services. Many of the sites were also somewhat isolated from public transport.

The base isolation was very expensive (Calvi and Spaziante 2009). The cushion capitals cost an average of €1,427 and each of the 187 buildings required 40 of them (€57,000, a grand total of €10.6 million). It could be argued that, as fewer than half of the transitional dwellings have base isolation, either it was not necessary or the majority of prefab-dwellers are disadvantaged in terms of seismic protection. The whole project (known as CASE - Complessi Antisismici Sostenibili ed Ecocompatibili) appeared to be a lavish experiment in seismic design.

Learned authors have argued that transitional housing creates a risk of slowing down permanent reconstruction (Johnson 2007). In the L'Aquila area, the contrast between the vast parks of prefabs and base-isolated buildings and the abandoned town and city centres was striking. Visually, and perhaps functionally, it appeared to be a kind of enforced modernity in an area that had never known anything of the sort. Moreover, it is modernity on the American model, in which the so-called "sustainable" and "ecocompatible" housing induced a massive dependence on the private car, without making provision for those residents who lack their own transport, or for needed improvements in infrastructure and access to services.

Survivors were left with the paradox of transitional--i.e. temporary--housing and no plan for returning to their original homes or revitalising the town centres. The paucity of services and induced social fragmentation in the transitional housing areas led to high levels of depression and post-traumatic stress, especially among women (Microdis 2011). It also contributed to stasis in the long-term recovery process.

Economics, employment and livelihoods

During the year 2009 some 24,000 jobs were lost in Abruzzo Region, 16,000 of them in the L'Aquila area (ISTAT 2010). The effects on employment were partly mitigated by outmigration, particularly of professionals and owners of small business who had lost their accommodation. Government policy offered few incentives to businesses and little flexibility to restart the local economy. Moreover, the new Italian fiscal federalism championed by the Northern League left rich provinces well off and deprived poor provinces of revenue. L'Aquila was at the bottom of the list, the greatest net loser of tax revenue as a result of the policy of decentralising taxation. This was welfare in reverse.

Although a modest boom was experienced in the construction industry (as is usual after earthquakes--Olson 2008), other sectors struggled to survive, including education, which is a vital economic motor for L'Aquila, a city that lacks other sources of employment. Moreover, the local infrastructure was placed under great strain during the aftermath and clearly needed major improvements, for which funds were not available.

Governance

In the aftermath of disaster it is common for groups to emerge that respond to the need to safeguard public interests. Although there were emergent groups in L'Aquila, they never achieved the public profile and political weight that such organisations have managed to acquire elsewhere in the world. This was one of several indicators of the lack of effective public participation in the recovery. Moreover, the local and regional political processes showed a lack of focus, power and influence, and thus responded ineffectively to public demands.

This decision-making and power vacuum was filled at the national level. Policy and strategy responded directly to the will of the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

It is unusual that the National Department of Civil Protection (DPC), a disaster response organisation, was so heavily involved in both the early reaction to the emergency and the medium-term recovery process (Alexander 2010). Although there is noting inherently wrong with such a strategy, elsewhere in the world more specific institutions have taken over. For example, in Pakistan after the 2005 seismic disaster the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) was constituted to manage the recovery (Zimmermann and Issa 2009).

There are two probable reasons for the deep involvement of the DPC in the recovery process. One is its role as a dependency of the Council of Ministers, the national cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister. After a brief, abortive attempt in 2000 to make it an independent agency, it has increasingly become an instrument of prime ministerial policy and has thus been politicised (Alexander 2002). The other is the ability of the DPC to issue emergency ordinances, which are legal instruments that in the interests of rapid reaction conveniently bypass the normal checks and balances on law-making. The scandal that broke in Italy in late 2010 about the misuse of ordinances from more among than 600 that had been passed in eight years, and the uncontrolled expenditure of €10.6 billion, can be seen as a means of wresting arbitrary power from the Prime Minister back to the other organs of state (Alexander 2011).

The heart of the matter

Mr Belusconi made his reputation as a populist prime minister who could be seen to exercise benign power in favour of needy people. In reality that power was wielded as a matter of self interest. The transfer of the G8 politico-economic summit from the Sardinian island lf La Maddalena to L'Aquila was a grand gesture. It led to the abandonment of facilities on which €300 million had already been spent and, in the end, it contributed very little to the recovery in L'Aquila. But it looked good.

The decision to concentrate efforts on the very rapid provision of durable, very high quality transitional housing also raised the Prime Minister's public profile. Again, it looked good, despite the damage done to the overall recovery process, the salvaging of cultural heritage, the viability of urban and regional systems and the processes of local governance. Resources were channelled into housing but not into other aspects of recovery. Considerable--and favourable--media attention was gained by the inauguration of this housing (1), which also helped Mr Berlusconi's party win provincial elections on 6-7 June 2009. Thereafter, the dysfunctional nature of the recovery process no longer mattered, as the political objectives had already been achieved.

Analogous conditions occurred with the problem of unplanned mass migrations from the other side of the Mediterranean. At the end of March 2011 Mr Berlusconi promised to liberate the island of Lampedusa of the 17,000 North African migrants that has accumulated there and severely overtaxed its accommodation facilities. He did so in the promised 60 hours by loading them onto a ship and dispersing them among other regions of southern Italy, notably Puglia, which is governed by the main opposition party. This transferred the problem elsewhere without solving it. Indeed, absconding, conflict and overloading of facilities were probably worse on the mainland. However, the net effect on his public image was positive, as the negative impacts had been offloaded onto other administrations.

Conclusion

In 1931 the writer B. Traven wrote a book called Government, which has since been reissued (Traven 1994). Set in provincial Mexico, this apocryphal novel contrasts the rigorous, severe democracy of the indigenous peoples with the corrupt, immoral administration of the Hispanic ruling caste. As each day passes, this 80-year-old work becomes more and more current. In a remarkable parable it chronicles the descent of democracy into subservience.

Traven's work combines acute observation of culturally specific factors with the elaboration of universal truths. Both sides can be seen in Abruzzo after the earthquake. At the time that Traven was writing so was the Abruzzan novelist Ignazio Silone (Fontamara, 1930; Bread and Wine, 1937). He chronicled the misery and subservience of 20th century feudalism. Both authors share a rich vein of irony and a prescient sense of history. In Abruzzo it is only a matter of decades since modernity arrived, unable to cancel out the traces of the feudal past in such a short space of time. Perhaps this explains the lack of demand for participatory democracy in L'Aquila. Where it has occurred in an exemplary manner (at Onna village), the prime mover has been the German Federal Government, which has sponsored the recovery there.

The key words that point the way to a valid interpretation of the L'Aquila earthquake are 'paternalism' and 'political expediency'. By means of the former, and in the name of the latter, vast sums of public money have been spent on image-mongering and vote garnering. The welfare of the earthquake survivors has thus been reduced to a byproduct of the national political process.

The essential conclusion of this analysis is that any attempt to understand the recovery from the L'Aquila earthquake in terms of conventional logic (i.e. common sense) is doomed to failure. Conventional logic assumes that people act in good faith for the common good. Undoubtedly, some of them do. Heroic efforts are being made in L'Aquila to recover from the earthquake by people who have the region's best interests at heart. But at the levels of policy and overall strategy the process responds to a political logic, whose priorities are not those of "the greatest good for the greatest number of people". Any attempt to force the model of recovery into something as Benthamite would lead to nothing but an erroneous interpretation. Worse still, by providing a normalised explanation, it would legitimise decisions and actions that deserve moral condemnation.

Endnote

(1) On behalf of the Italian State, and in the glare of television lights, the Prime Minister also inaugurated the transitional housing at Onna village, the worst damaged settlement outside L'Aquila city. This was despite the fact that the new village was largely paid for and constructed by the Autonomous Province of Trento, whose president conspicuously refused to participate in the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the founding of modern Italy, stating that his home territory had been annexed in 1919, not founded in 1861.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2002. The evolution of civil protection in modern Italy. In J. Dickie, J. Foot and F. Snowden (eds) Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics, Society. Palgrave Press, New York: 165-185.

Alexander, D.E. 2010. The L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government policy on disaster response. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 2(4): 325-342.

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Civil protection amid disasters and scandals. In E. Gualmini and E. Pasotti (eds) Italian Politics 2011. Berghahn, New York and London; La protezione civile tra scandali e disastri naturali. Politica in Italia 2011: i fatti dell'anno e le interpretazioni. Istituto Cattaneo, Il Mulino, Bologna: 187-206.

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

Beatley, T. 1989. Towards a moral philosophy of natural disaster mitigation. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 7(1): 5-32.

G.M. Calvi and V. Spaziante 2009. Reconstruction between temporary and definitive: the C.A.S.E. project. Progettazione Sismica 03: 240-241.

Germany, K.B. 2007. The politics of poverty and history: racial inequality and the long prelude to Katrina. Journal of American History 94: 743-751.

ISTAT 2010. Rilevazione sulle forze di lavoro. Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, Rome. www.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/in_calendario/forzelav/20090922_00/

Johnson, C. 2007. Strategic planning for post-disaster temporary housing. Disasters 31(4): 435-458.

Lantis, J.S. and E. Moskowitz 2008. The return of the imperial presidency? The Bush doctrine and the U.S. intervention in Iraq. In R.G. Carter (ed.) Contemporary Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy: From Terrorism to Trade (3rd edn). CQ Press, Washington, DC: 25-36.

Microdis 2011. Key findings: psychological impacts. MICRODIS-Aquila FP6 Project, funded by the European Commission. www.microdis-eu.be/content/official-project-documents

Olson, R.S. 2008. Toward a politics of disaster: losses, values, agendas, and blame. In A. Boin (ed.) Crisis Management, Vol. 3. Sage Library in Business and Management, Sage, Berverly Hills, California: 154-170.

Tierney, K. 2006. Social inequality, hazards, and disasters. In R.J. Daniels, D.F. Kettl and H. Kunreuther (eds) On Risk and Disaster: Lessons From Hurricane Katrina. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: 109-128.

Transparency International 2009. Global Corruption Report 2009. Transparency International, Berlin, 394 pp.

Traven, B. 1994. Government (1931). Allison & Busby, London, 240 pp.

Zimmermann, M.N. and S.S. Issa 2009. Risk-conscious reconstruction in Pakistan-administered Kashmir: a case study of the Chakhama valley. Mountain Research and Development 29(3): 202-210.

Resilience Against Earthquakes: Some Practical Suggestions for Planners and Managers

2011-05-05T18:07:00.008+02:00

Figure 1. An explanatory classification of vulnerability to hazards and disasters. Source: MOVE Project, www.move-fp7.eu.

Figure 2. Characteristic pattern of damage in a multiple-storey condominium building affected by the L'Aquila, central Italy earthquake of 6 April 2009.

Abstract. Resilience against earthquakes is a broad concept that requires a multi-disciplinary response. This paper offers a working definition of resilience and associated concepts, including vulnerability to earthquakes, coping, capacity and redundancy. It concludes that resilience must be set in motion and maintained by a collective effort that involves all stakeholders and people who are at risk in areas of high seismicity. Resilience is one of the fundamental components of disaster risk reduction (DRR), an overall strategy for adapting to and mitigating the impact of extreme events on people and society. The paper offers a modest contribution to the creation of a methodology for resilience against earthquakes. This includes ten suggestions for action, as follows. (1) Tell people what to do in an earthquake. Research is needed on the best forms of self protective behaviour during seismic emergencies. This needs one to understand the characteristic forms of building failure and how they affect building occupants. It also requires knowledge of how people react to earthquakes and what opportunities there are for self-protective behaviour. (2) Develop urban search and rescue capacity on site. This need not be expensive or particularly challenging. It requires stockpiling of basic rescue equipment at strategic points in urban areas and training programmes for local residents. (3) Reduce non-structural as well as structural hazards. A significant proportion of earthquake injuries arises from damage to the non-structural elements of the built environment. Anchoring and securing these, and designing them to resist earthquake displacement, can save lives and reduce the incidence of serious injuries. (4) Plan flexibly. Emergency planning should be a process and not an end. It must be adapted continually to changes in knowledge of hazards and in society and its vulnerability. (5) Create networks. These can improve the exchange of knowledge, information and training. Networks are needed at all scales, from the local to the international, and from professionals to local residents threatened by earthquakes. (6) Encourage governance. This requires involvement of many different kinds of stakeholder in the processes of earthquake disaster risk reduction. (7) Make good practice proliferate and adapt it to local circumstances. (8) Ensure that programmes of DRR are sustainable in the long term. In order to work they must have a constant revenue stream and also the full support of beneficiaries. (9) Before the next major seismic event occurs create a strategy for recovering from it. Consider how the recovery will be planned and guided, and what needs will be generated by the event. (10) Create a culture of resilience against earthquakes, in which the problem is widely understood and taken seriously by people who are at risk or are in positions of authority. This also involves sharing knowledge about earthquakes and sharing the risk to society.

Key words: Earthquakes, Resilience, Disasters, Injury prevention, Damage reduction.

Introduction: On the Definition of Terms

The term resilience, or resiliency, had its origins in developments about a century ago in the field of mechanics and materials testing (Hoffman 1948). A resilient material has enough rigidity to resist an applied force and also sufficient flexibility to absorb part of the stress. The concept was taken up in the 1960s by ecologists (Holling 1973) and later by psychologists (Rutter 1987). In the 2000s it began to be widely applied to the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR). By analogy with mechanics, a resilient society is one that is simultaneously able to resist the impact of disasters (i.e. avoid a certain amount of harm and damage) and absorb it by adapting to the hazard (Berkes 2007).

Resilience in DRR interacts with the concepts of coping, capacity and capability (Billing and Madengruber 2006). A society that is resilient to hazards has developed its ability to cope with them. This involves both direct prior preparedness and setting aside resources against future losses (i.e. capacity). Formally, the latter can be achieved by insurance (the maintenance of a pool of money to reimburse people who suffer loss) and by creating redundancy, the provision of duplicate resources, services and procedures (Carroll 2004). As redundancy is expensive, and because it can tie up resources that are seldom used, it is not usually one of the favoured options, but when a major event takes place it can become a very precious safeguard.

The sum of resilience, coping and capacity is the inverse of vulnerability (Birkmann 2006). In the present context, this refers to the propensity of human socio-economic systems to suffer harm as a result of major hazards. Vulnerability is the dominant component of risk and both are difficult to measure because they are innate phenomena. Like friction, vulnerability is only mobilised when a hazard strikes. By the time it is recognised and can be investigated it has already become impact, its post hoc form. In disaster research there is a developing consensus that the protection of lives and livelihoods (i.e. gainful employment) is the key to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience (Cannon 2006). It has also become apparent that vulnerability is composed of many factors, as summarised in Figure 1. The components interact and influence each other.

The 'What?' and 'How?' of Resilience

The axiom that "resilience is needed against earthquakes" requires qualification in order to ensure that it does not lead to an indiscriminate approach. Priorities need to be established so that resources are not wasted. In general terms, these should be to reduce loss of life, care for the injured, limit damage and provide conditions for rapid and effective recovery, including the timely provision of shelter to people who have lost their homes. Given the propensity of earthquakes to cause mass fatalities (Spence 2007), the largest emphasis should be given to effective (including cost-effective) measures to reduce loss of life. In this context, resilience must be created and maintained by collective effort. All members of society are stakeholders and all should be involved in the process of making conditions safer. This requires mechanisms of consultation and social inclusion, which thus contribute to the process of governance, government by active consensus (Qian 2010).

As building collapse is widely known to be the principal cause of death and injury in earthquakes, it follows logically that one of the greatest strategic priorities should be to make buildings less susceptible to catastrophic damage by enforcing good building codes, retrofitting pre-code buildings and banning unsafe development (Xie 2007). Note, however, that non-structural damage within and around buildings is an important secondary source of injury (Petal 2004).

Specialised search and rescue are likely to be in short supply during a major seismic event. However, little is known about the impact of this on rates of survival in collapsed buildings, except that it is potentially high (De Bruycker et al. 1983). Moreover, little is known about the impact of immediate response by untrained, unequipped people, who are often the only ones on site when rescue is needed. Evidence from the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 suggests that amateur rescue in collapsed buildings can be highly dangerous (Durkin 1989), unless it is complemented by training and the provision of safety equipment.

Resilience means a safe environment, but if it cannot be achieved in any reasonable future time period, people should at least be encouraged to learn self-protective modes of behaviour.

A Strategy to Encourage Self-Protective Behaviour in Earthquakes

If buildings cannot be made safe enough to withstand earthquakes, can occupant behaviour be modified in such a way as to minimise the risks of being crushed or entrapped when a disaster occurs? Unfortunately, despite decades of research on the epidemiology of earthquakes, there is still a lack of knowledge of types of injury in relation to patterns of building collapse and occupant behaviour, and thus of risk factors in particular situations (e.g. Sami et al. 2009). Nevertheless, it would be useful to develop a methodology that will form the basis of a strategy to react better to earthquakes when they occur.

The first step is to know the level of seismic risk and what it is capable of doing. This involves predicting magnitudes, recurrence intervals, maximum accelerations of the ground and other variables that influence the performance of buildings and structures. It also involves developing an understanding of the seismic performance of typical buildings in the local area. In many architectural environments this may be relatively easy to achieve at a basic level. For instance, the L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 in central Italy led to characteristic patterns of damage to vernacular housing that involved only two main types of building: one in stone masonry and one in reinforced concrete (Alexander 2011). An example of how lack of stiffness in a frame structure leads to a concentration on mid-floor damage is given in Figure 2.

The second step is to create scenarios of impact and damage and relate them to patterns of human activity and occupancy of buildings and built environments that are at risk from seismic events. There are essentially five levels of risk to people, in relation to seismic damage levels.

1. Damage level: [1] minimum damage to walls, fitments and furniture.

Personal risk level: prudent behaviour will minimise risks.

2. Damage level: [2] significant damage to structures, cladding and fitments.

Personal risk level: significant risk of injury but not of death.

3. Damage level: [3] general damage and collapse of architectural elements.

Personal risk level: significant risk of injury but relatively low risk of death.

4. Damage level: [4] serious damage or partial collapse of building.

Personal risk level: strong risk of injury and significant risk of death.

5. Damage level: [5] collapse of more than 50% of the structure.

Personal risk level: limited and mainly unpredictable probability of survival.

Whereas little can be done to save people caught in the total collapse of a structure, the previous four levels involve degrees of criticality in which behaviour will influence the probability of being injured (levels 1-4) or killed (levels 3-4).

The procedure for enhancing self-protected behaviour is thus as follows. First ascertain the characteristic patterns of seismic damage and transform them into simple models that are applicable to significant proportions of buildings in a given urban area. This will help explain how people are put at risk. It is helpful if such buildings can be mapped for emergency planning purposes so as to show where the greatest vulnerabilities lie. It is also useful if the level of vulnerability to damage can be ascertained for each building by structural engineers. This is seismic microzonation.

Secondly, survival strategies need to be worked out. These should be communicated to residents and building users, who should be encouraged to plan for an emergency situation. The survival strategy could consist of the following parts.

1. Identify the safest part of the house with regard to the following risks: fall of tiles or collapse of the entire roof
- instability of the façade and cornice
- potential collapse of the stairs during egress
- detachment of beams and risk that they will batter down the building
- use of heterogeneous materials giving rise to a complex seismic response.

2. Avoid risky behaviour.

3. Create an exit strategy:
- identify a safe place to reach near to the house
- identify the most dangerous parts of the house and how to avoid them

4. Create a mutual support network of friends, relatives and neighbours.

5. Collect and store useful equipment:
- train family members and test the reaction plan.

For example, in many cases façades that are badly anchored to the structure of the building can collapse, or at least elements of them can detach during the shaking and fall into the street. At the same time, stairways are often the least stable part of the building, especially if they are inadequately suspended from floors and load-bearing members. They may collapse during the tremors. Hence it may be highly inappropriate to rush out into the street until the hazards of doing so have been properly assessed (Lomnitz 1970).

Ideally, a programme of resilience against earthquakes should accumulate information and expertise about possible damage and potential reactions of people caught in major seismic events. There is also some scope for pre-emptive planning of search and rescue, especially if it is known where, characteristically, people are most likely to be trapped when a certain kind of building collapses (Olson and Olson 1987).

Ten Suggestions for Increasing Resilience to Earthquakes

The previous section offered a rather limited strategy for improving survival rates in earthquakes. This should be part of a much broader initiative to save lives, reduce damage and injuries and increase society's resilience in the face of the seismic threat. There follow ten suggestions about how to achieve this.

(1) Tell people what to do during an earthquake. As noted in the previous section, the biggest risk tends to be when people are at home in vulnerable vernacular housing, especially at night when they are sleeping. There is a need for authoritative knowledge on the best self-protective behaviour, and for a methodology to assess risk in vernacular housing and other kinds of accommodation.

(2) Develop urban search and rescue (USAR) capabilities on site. One of the great tragedies of major earthquakes is that USAR capacity often comes from thousands of kilometres away and does not arrive until 36-72 hours after the earthquake. Typically, between 1,200 and 2,300 rescuers from up to 50 different countries may converge on the disaster area in this way (El-Tawil and Aguirre 2010). Instead, USAR capacity is needed immediately, and in all cases before 12 hours have elapsed. Hence, stockpiling of simple equipment (ladders, ropes, flashlights, loud-hailers, reflective garments, hard hats, first-aid medical supplies, etc.) in local neighbourhoods and training local people to constitute their own rescue groups can achieve much. However, people must be trained to avoid the risks associated with urban heavy rescue and to understand the nature of earthquake injuries and how they should be treated by basic life support (first-aid) procedures.

(3) Reduce non-structural as well as structural risks. Many of these are internal to buildings, although some, like collapse of signage, are external. Many non-structural risks can easily be assessed and remedied, often by a small amount of work securing items to structural members with screws, bands and other anchors.

(4) Plan flexibly. Planning should be a process not an end in itself: in fact, the planning process is often more useful than the product (the emergency plan), as it tends to identify and highlight problems that need to be solved. Plans should cover all risks and should allow for multiple and secondary hazards. They should use scenarios of impact, response and recovery, as this is the best way of investigating what is likely to occur in a major emergency. Scenarios are flexible investigations of possible alternative futures: rather than being a predictive device, the scenario is a means of understanding cause and effect relationships, and of ascertaining future needs.

(5) Create networks. These need to be built at all scales, from international collaborations of experts to local and area networks of responders and residents. The presence of support networks helps keep the issue of seismic safety current and ensures that people do not feel alone. It helps disseminate information and promote learning and information sharing (Brower et al. 2009). Networks may be efficient means of diffusing innovation to people who can benefit from it. They create a benign form of disaster subculture, which contributes to social solidarity.

(6) Encourage governance. This can include promoting stakeholder involvement and personal disaster planning. Few people have their own disaster plans, or any idea as to what they and their families would need to do in a disaster situation. Yet it need not be so. Governance for seismic risk reduction is both an national and a local matter, but as the local area is always the theatre of disaster impact and response, it is the main foundation of all governance devoted to resolving this issue. Moreover, one needs to understand and work with local culture, as this will facilitate the acceptance of new ideas and strategies.

(7) Make good practice proliferate. The networks can be used to ensure that this happens. Although there is really no such thing as best practice, as circumstances differ from one place to another, good examples can be adapted to new areas, and research results need to be utilised.

(8) Ensure programmes are sustainable. For this to happen, the programmes need to have full support from stakeholders in all branches of civil society. One recurrent problem is that while it is relatively easy to induce public administrators to authorise one-off payments (i.e. capital expenditure), they are less happy with recurrent spending (i.e. revenue expenditure). Nevertheless, this is necessary, as salaries have to be paid and programmes need to benefit from continuity of funding. Hence, disaster risk reduction needs to be considered as a fundamental everyday service, as essential as waste treatment and electricity supply, and as well funded.

(9) Create a post-earthquake policy and strategy before the next major seismic event. Few public administrations have been innovative enough to plan for recovery before disaster, although the disaster researcher Harold Foster described some such examples of that as long ago as the 1970s (Foster 1980). Nevertheless, although the full details of what will be needed cannot be known before the event, the basic lineaments of recovery are likely to be clear in advance. There should thus be a plan for the provision of shelter, and a strategy for safeguarding livelihoods and thus promoting economic recovery.

(10) Create a culture of resilience against earthquakes. This involves a social programme of information and discussion that brings resilience into the mainstream of daily life. People need to be induced to believe that although natural hazards do not strike every day, they are a constant threat to lives and livelihoods and there is a common responsibility to face up to that threat. It helps to be able to answer the question "what is welfare?" (Forrest 1973). The answer should probably be that it is the safeguarding of people who, through poverty, age or disability, are unable to look after themselves in some way. Welfare also means the ethical distribution of resources and the maintenance of minimum standards of living. The concept, and its morality and ethics, should not be distorted by disaster. Hence, it needs to be examined--fairly, critically and explicitly--before disaster strikes.

Conclusion: Beyond Resilience

The discussion presented above suggests that there is much that can be done to reduce the risks of casualties and socio-economic effects of earthquakes, even if damage cannot substantially be abated. Society needs to be hardened, so that it resists the impact of disaster by devoting resources and organisation to that process. This is sometimes termed social capital building (Murphy 2007). Thus, expertise, experience, know-how and resourcefulness need to be concentrated in the community and conserved and developed over time so that they can be handed on from one generation to the next. Programmes need to be sustainable in their own right and also need to interface with the more general problem of the sustainability of life. In fact, perhaps the biggest challenge of the future will be, not merely to make society resilient to disasters such as earthquakes, but also to make it resilient to less cataclysmic changes (in sea level, global climate, resource availability, and so on) that are none the less fundamental.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Mortality and morbidity risk in the L'Aquila, Italy, earthquake of 6 April 2009 and lessons to be learned. In R.S. Spence and E. Ho (eds) Human Casualties in Earthquakes. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research no. 29, Springer, Berlin, Ch. 13.

Berkes, F. 2007. Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: lessons from resilience thinking. Natural Hazards 41(2): 283-295.

Billing, P. and U. Madengruber 2006. Overcoming the black hole: outline for a quantitative model to compare coping capacities across countries. In J. Birkmann (ed.) Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo: 403-414.

Birkmann, J. 2006. Indicators and criteria for measuring vulnerability: theoretical bases and requirements. In J. Birkmann (ed.) Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo: 55-77.

Brower, R.S., S.O. Choi, H-S. Jeong and J. Dilling 2009. Forms of inter-organizational learning in emergency management networks. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 6: Article 66.

Cannon, T. 2006. Vulnerability analysis, livelihoods and disasters. In W.J. Ammann, S. Dannenmann and L. Vulliet (eds) Risk 21: Coping with Risks Due to Natural Hazards in the 21st Century. A.A. Balkema, Taylor and Francis, London: 41-49.

Carroll, J.S. 2004. Redundancy as a design principle and an operating principle. Risk Analysis 24(4): 955-957.

De Bruycker, M., D. Greco, I. Annino, M.A. Stazi, N. De Ruggiero, M. Triassi, Y.P. De Kettenis and M.F. Lechat 1983. The 1980 earthquake in southern Italy: rescue of trapped victims and mortality. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 61(6): 1021-1025.

Durkin, M.E. 1989. The role of the physical setting in earthquake injuries: the Mexico experience. In Lessons Learned from the 1985 Mexico Earthquake. Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, El Cerrito, Calif.: 205-208.

El-Tawil, S. and B. Aguirre 2010. Search and rescue in collapsed structures: engineering and social science aspects. Disasters 34(4): 1084-1101.

Forrest, T.R. 1973. Needs and group emergence: developing a welfare response. American Behavioral Scientist 16: 413-425.

Foster, H.D. 1980. Disaster Planning: The Preservation of Life and Property. Springer-Verlag, New York, 275 pp.

Hoffman, R.M. 1948. A generalised concept of resilience. Textile Research Journal 18(3): 141-148.

Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Reviews of Ecological Systems 4:1-23.

Lomnitz, C. 1970. Casualties and behaviour of populations during earthquakes. Bulletin of Seismological Society of America 60: 1309-1313.

Murphy, B.L. 2007. Locating social capital in resilient community-level emergency management. Natural Hazards 41(2): 297-315.

Olson, R.S. and R.A. Olson 1987. Urban heavy rescue. Earthquake Spectra 3(4): 645-658.

Petal, M.A. 2004. Urban Disaster Mitigation and Preparedness: The 1999 Kocaeli Earthquake. PhD Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.

Qian Ye 2010. Integrated risk governance project: towards better governance of very large-scale risks in the world. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 1(1): 44-45.

Rutter, M. 1987. Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57(3): 316-331.

Sami, F., F. Ali, S.H.H. Zaidi, H. Rehman, T. Ahmad and M.I. Siddiqui 2009. The October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan: patterns of injuries in victims brought to the emergency relief hospital, Doraha, Mansehra. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 24(6): 535-539.

Spence, R. 2007. Saving lives in earthquakes: successes and failures in seismic protection since 1960. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering 5: 139-251.

Xie, L-L., Y-H. Ma and J-J. Hu 2007. A conception of casualty control based seismic design for buildings. Natural Hazards 40(2): 279-287.

Offprints available

2011-02-10T16:45:00.008+01:00

PDF offprints of any of the following articles and book chapters can be requested by sending an email to me at d.alexander@alice.it.

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Scenario methodology for teaching principles of emergency management. Disaster Prevention and Management 9(2): 89-97.

Alexander, D.E. 2002. Nature's impartiality, man's inhumanity: reflections on terrorism and world crisis in a context of historical disaster. Disasters 26(1): 1-9.

Alexander, D.E. 2002. From civil defence to civil protection--and back again. Disaster Prevention and Management 11(3): 209-213.

Alexander, D.E. 2003. Towards the development of standards in emergency management training and education. Disaster Prevention and Management 12(2): 113-123.

Alexander. D.E. 2003. Terrorism, disasters and security. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 18(3): 165-169.

Alexander, D.E. 2004. Cognitive mapping as an emergency management training exercise. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 12(4): 150-159.

Alexander, D.E. 2005. Towards the development of a standard for emergency planning. Disaster Prevention and Management 14(2): 158-175.

Alexander, D.E. 2005. An interpretation of disaster in terms of changes in culture, society and international relations. In R.W. Perry and E.L. Quarantelli (eds) What is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions. Xlibris Press, Philadelphia: 1-15.

Alexander, D.E. 2005. The meaning of disaster: a reply to Wolf R. Dombrowsky. In R.W. Perry and E.L. Quarantelli (eds) What is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions. Xlibris Press, Philadelphia: 75-81.

Alexander, D.E. 2005. Vulnerability to landslides. In T. Glade, M. Anderson and M. Crozier (eds) Landslide Hazard and Risk. Wiley, Chichester, UK: 175-198.

Alexander, D.E. 2006. Globalization of disaster: trends, problems and dilemmas. Journal of International Affairs 59(2): 1-22.

Alexander, D.E. 2006. Crisis intervention and risk reduction. In W.J. Ammann, S. Danneman and L. Vulliet (eds) Risk 21: Coping with Risks Due to Natural Hazards in the 21st Century. A.A. Balkema, Taylor and Francis, London: 51-56.

Alexander, D.E. 2007. Misconception as a barrier to teaching about disasters. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 22(2): 95-103.

Alexander, D.E. 2007. Making research on geological hazards relevant to stakeholders' needs. Quaternary International 171/172: 186-192.

Alexander, D.E. 2007. Disaster management: from theory to implementation. Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering 9(1): 39-49.

Alexander, D.E. 2007. "From Rubble to Monument" revisited: modernised perspectives on recovery from disaster. In D. Alexander, C.H. Davidson, A. Fox, C. Johnson and G. Lizzarralde (eds) Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Meeting Stakeholder Needs. Firenze University Press, Florence: xiii-xxii.

Alexander, D.E. 2008. A survey of GIS and mass movement studies and some reflections on theory and methodology. Geomorphology 94(3-4): 261-267.

Alexander, D.E. 2008. Emergency command systems and major earthquake disasters. Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering 10(3): 109-118.

Alexander, D.E. 2008. Mainstreaming disaster risk management. Chapter 2 in L. Bosher (ed.) Hazards and the Built Environment: Attaining Built-in Resilience. Taylor and Francis, London: 20-36.

Alexander, D.E., L. Bramati and M. Simonetta 2009. Emergency preparedness training and education in Lombardy Region, Italy: survey of supply and demand. Natural Hazards Review 10(3): 77-83.

Alexander, D.E. 2009. Principles of emergency planning. In U. Fra Paleo (ed.) Building Safer Communities: Risk Governance, Spatial Planning and Responses to Natural Hazards. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series, Vol. 58. IOS Press, Amsterdam: 162-174.

Alexander, D.E. 2010. The voluntary sector in emergency response and civil protection: review and recommendations. International Journal of Emergency Management 7(1): 151-166.

Alexander, D.E. 2010. The L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government policy on disaster response. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 2(4): 325-342.

Alexander, D.E. 2010. News reporting of the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake: the role of common misconceptions. Journal of Emergency Management 8(6): 15-27.

Alexander, D.E. 2010. Rapid adaptation to threat: the London bombings of July 7, 2005. In L.K. Comfort, A. Boin and C. C. Demchak (eds) Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 143-157.

Alexander, D. 2010. Bioterrorism and pandemics: a new world order of civil defence. In A. Trufanov, A. Rossodivita and M. Guidotti (eds) Pandemics and Bioterrorism: Transdisciplinary Information Sharing for Decision-Making Against Biological Threats. NATO Science for Peace and Security, Series E: Human and Societal Dynamics Vol. 62. IOS Press, Amsterdam: 105-113.

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Mortality and morbidity risk in the L'Aquila, Italy, earthquake of 6 April 2009 and lessons to be learned. In R.S. Spence and E. Ho (eds) Human Casualties in Earthquakes. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research no. 29, Springer, Berlin, Ch. 13.

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Sense and sensibility about terrorism: a European perspective. Integrated Disaster Risk Management Journal 1(1).

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Disability and disaster. In B. Wisner, J-C. Gaillard and I. Kelman (eds) Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction. Routledge, London: 384-394.

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Towards a practical phenomenology of architecture and natural hazards. In G.P. Brogiolo, D.E. Angelucci, A. Colecchia and F. Remondino (eds) Teoria e metodi della ricerca sui paesaggi d’altura. Società Archeologica Padana, Mantova, Italy: 203-214.

Alexander, D.E. 2012. Resilience against earthquakes: some practical suggestions for planners and managers. Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering 13(1): 131-137.

Alexander, D.E. 2012. The London bombings of July 7, 2005. In B. Jacobs, A. Boin, L.K. Comfort and I. Helsloot (eds). Megacrises. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois: 158-167.

An Evaluation of the Recovery Strategy after the 6 April 2009 Earthquake in L'Aquila, Central Italy

2010-12-30T14:19:00.007+01:00

Background

In physical terms, the earthquake of 6 April 2009 at L'Aquila was a moderate seismic event. The Irpinia earthquake of 23 November 1980 released 5.6 times more energy, and it thus affected an area ten times as large. However, the very high level of vulnerability of built structures in L'Aquila meant that the effect of the 2009 event was disproportionately serious. It was thus the worst seismic disaster to occur in Italy for 29 years. As a result, it can be regarded as a test of the national civil protection system in its current form and also an opportunity to appraise the evolution of national policies, organisation and techniques for managing the recovery from large disasters.[1] This article evaluates the response to the disaster with particular reference to the medium term and the use of transitional housing.

The Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake of 1980 was not only as a major national disaster, it was also as the dawn of a new era of civil protection. At the time, Law no.996 of 1970, governing emergency response, had not been fully enacted and hence the system was far from complete, even in the rudimentary manner of the time. However, the Friuli earthquakes of 1976 had given valuable experience in how to cope with large catastrophes, including the organisation of hospital response to mass casualty situations, relief columns, prefabricated shelter and the use of a relief commissar to direct operations. Nevertheless, in Irpinia the response was far from efficient. It took another quarter of a century to create a system composed of trained, equipped volunteers and professional workers organised into a coherent network of managers and responders, centrally directed and equipped with modern communications.

The abolition of conscription in the Italian armed forces effectively deprived the civil protection system of a well of autonomous manpower that had to be compensated for by increasing the training and equipment of the country's 3,600 civil protection volunteer forces. The new system, bolstered by the federalism inherent in the 'Bassanini' decree-law of 1998 (DL 112, articles 107 and 108) took responsibility from the prefects and gave it to the regions and provinces, leading to an uneasy compromise between central state and devolved entities. Nonetheless, it worked, not least because the L'Aquila emergency was nowhere near as large as past and potential earthquake disasters further south. Hence, in many respects the real test is yet to come, and the strategy employed at L'Aquila is likely to be a poor guide to how it will be managed.

Immediate response: hours to days

The response to the developing emergency in L'Aquila involved a doctrine akin to that used in the invasion of Baghdad, namely overwhelming force.[2] Civil protection and emergency medical structures in Abruzzo Region were extremely weak and the national response effectively sidelined them and replaced them with resources drawn from the entire nation and dominated by the regions and provinces that are most powerful in terms of civil protection, notably Trento, Roma, Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. Although the response confirmed the primacy of the National Fire Brigades as the country's principal emergency responder—i.e. the lead agency—the failure of local systems meant that the first and most urgent need, treatment of seriously injured victims, had to be accomplished by military means using techniques developed for the evacuation of wounded soldiers from battlefields, or medevac.[3]

The early response to the disaster established and consolidated a policy that was to have profound effects on the longer-term emergency, namely the supplanting of local authority by the national hierarchy.[4] Although, in legal terms, the mayors of municipalities are the ultimate civil protection authorities, in the province of L'Aquila the Department of Civil Protection, and in places the Italian Armed Forces, commanded. This included the crucial decision to translocate the entire population of L'Aquila and of the centres of other towns, the first time in modern Italian history that a major city has been totally and mandatorily evacuated.

The division of the affected area into seven districts, managed from a national DiComaC (Centre of Direction for Command and Control), established a geographical pattern based on the cascading principle of command centres, in which the Mixed Operations Centres (COMs) in larger settlements act as points of reference for the Municipal Operations Centres (COCs) in the smaller towns.

The initial operation succeeded in that, by saturating the area with rescuers and ensuring that they were well coordinated, the main problems were overcome. These included the need to re-establish medical care, given serious damage to San Salvatore, the region's main hospital (two field hospitals were used), the need to protect the public by interdicting areas of structural collapse, and the need to provide food and shelter to the survivors.

Short term: the first six months

Earthquakes are the archetypical sudden impact disasters, in that they occur virtually without warning and can instantly leave very large numbers of people homeless.[5] In the case of L'Aquila, about 67,000 residents suffered this fate. In most instances, there is a transition from improvised shelter (cars, buses, undamaged public buildings, etc.) to transitional settlement and then to reconstructed permanent housing. The transitional shelter may involve a sequence in its own right, for example using caravans (trailers) and then prefabricated buildings. Commonly, the passage from improvised shelter to the first transitional housing is completed within a few days or weeks.[6]

The decision to accommodate survivors of the L'Aquila earthquake in tents and hotels for six months was unusual in comparison with practice elsewhere in the world. Climatically, the prolonged use of tents was feasible, as the period spanned the spring and summer, although there were problems of very high temperatures in mid-summer and intense rainstorms with localised flooding. The 171 tent camps were mostly small, self-contained entities set up in any available local space within or near to the damaged settlements. In some cases, heavy-handed security measures led residents to complain of being cooped up in lagers, but essentially the policy worked. It was nonetheless hard going to live for half a year in an eight-person tent.

By accident or design, about one third of the survivors found their own accommodation, one third were accommodated in tents and the remainder went into hotels. The problem with this last category was that most of the hotel accommodation was located close to the Adriatic Sea coast at considerable distance from L'Aquila and separated from it by the natural barrier of the Gran Sasso mountain, the highest in Apennine Italy. Social surveys revealed that many adults suffered from a sense of abandonment and disorientation after prolonged absences, but paradoxically children fared better in the hotels than in the tent camps, as social structure and a sense of community appeared to survive better in the former than in the latter.

During the early phase of the aftermath several problems emerged that were to become chronic later on. One was the degradation of the infrastructure and services of the affected area and another was loss of productive employment. It is axiomatic that recovery from disaster needs sources of work and income.[7] The primary source of these is usually the construction industry, although if recovery does not empower other sectors of the economy the result can be a 'boom' followed by a 'bust' when the reconstruction is either finished or stalls.[8]

It is estimated—unofficially, as official statistics are hard to obtain—that between 16,000 and 26,000 jobs were lost as a result of the L'Aquila earthquake. Faced with loss of accommodation and the abandonment of town centres, professional people left the area in large numbers. School enrolments declined. The main employer in L'Aquila is its university, which was left in a precarious position with all major buildings damaged to a greater or lesser extent. Fiscal incentives for employment have been severely limited and suspension of enrolment fees at the university has barely enabled it to hold its own. Moreover, the devolution of taxation so ardently promoted by successive Italian governments since the 1990s has proved advantageous to some provinces of Italy and fiscally regressive to others. L'Aquila is the worst affected example of the latter. Finally, without improvement of the local infrastructure, the area has suffered economic stagnation and decline.

Medium to long term: months to years

The decision to move the Italian G8 summit from La Maddalena, Sardinia, to L'Aquila was, at the time (July 2009), seen as a gesture of solidarity with the victims of the earthquake. However, it had remarkably little impact on their plight.[2] Upgrades to the local infrastructure were limited to an extremely small area. Funds pledged by foreign powers never materialised as the recession began to bight. However, the spotlight remained on L'Aquila and by the autumn transitional housing was available for 24,000 homeless survivors.

The flagship of the programme is the C.A.S.E. (Complessi Antisismici Sostenibili ed Ecocompatibili) project to construct 184 housing units on 19 sites to accommodate 15,500 residents (Figure 1). These two- or three-storey buildings are base isolated against earthquakes. They are constructed of wood with concrete base plates and steel frames. A more modest solution is provided by the M.A.P. (Moduli Abitativi Provvisori) prefabs erected on more than 50 sites, half of them in the municipality of L'Aquila, and housing 8,500 survivors (Figure 2).[9]

Figure 1. C.A.S.E. three-storey units at Assergi, L'Aquila

Figure 2. M.A.P. units and damaged settlement at Villa Sant'Angelo (AQ)

Whereas the price of a basic prefabricated dwelling of 40 sq. m. is about €12,000-15,000, the C.A.S.E. units cost more than 20 times as much, or an average of €280,607 per unit or €3,750 per sq. m., including public spaces.[10] These are remarkably high figures for transitional housing and represent an entirely new policy. The C.A.S.E. policy is a remarkable achievement, the rehousing of more than 15,000 people in new buildings on greenfield sites in only six months, with protection against future earthquake damage. The C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. projects represent the latest evolution and most extravagant form of the prefabricated post-disaster transitional dwelling. There are various unresolved issues with these buildings, listed as follows.

Durability and maintenance. Buildings containing a high proportion of wood require a continuous cycle of maintenance, yet the L'Aquila area does not have experience or a tradition of this. Some uncorrected signs of decay were already apparent after a few months, and the local climate is one of the most extreme in peninsular Italy. One effect of the L'Aquila earthquake has been to cause an abrupt change from stone and concrete construction to building in wood (Figure 3). It remains to be seen what the fire risk will turn out to be, given that traditionally urban areas in peninsular Italy have been of low flammability and hence have not required or obtained large firefighting resources.

Figure 3. Wooden church under construction at Fossa (AQ).

Longevity and future uses. In the plans for the C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. units there is no indication of the intended lifespan of the buildings or of any future use of the units or their sites, other than vague references to 'student housing', which would be inappropriate on such a scale. Such huge investments imply that the transitional housing will span decades rather than years. This is borne out by the fact that remnants of temporary dwellings are still to be found in Messina (1908 earthquake) and Avezzano (1915), as well as in the Belice Valley of western Sicily (1968).

Lack of services and public transport. The C.A.S.E. and M.A.P. accomodate up to 2,500 people at each site, but in almost all cases there are no basic services and there is only very limited public transport. Social cohesion and functional living are not helped by a situation in which all that has been provided is housing and some landscaping.

Isolated sites. At the time of assignment of the units, by far the most popular site was the only one that is located in L'Aquila city itself. Arischia and Assergi are two C.A.S.E. sites that are respectively 15 and 16 km from L'Aquila. Neither are near significant commercial, medical or administrative centres.

Questionable ecological values. The sourcing of materials and use of solar panels may qualify the C.A.S.E. units to be regarded as 'ecocompatible', but the dispersion and isolation of the sites, and the poor quality of public transport have induced a massive dependency on the private car, despite the lack of improvement of the local infrastructure. Moreover, some of the sites have no wastewater treatment facilities. Finally, several are built on conservation land and others are on prime farmland.

Questionable urban values. Much money and effort was expended on landscaping and urbanising the transitional housing sites, with road networks, retaining walls, footpaths, greenery and communal park areas. While this has made for a pleasant environment, although one without any particular local character, it represents a sort of forced modernisation, which entirely breaks with tradition. Given the closure and—one hopes temporary—abandonment of the historical centres, there has been a precipitous loss of the genius loci of the area. It is not clear how much of this can be recovered. At its worst the closure might also represent a form of forced migration. Such a phenomenon is not unknown after modern disasters and was encountered in the southern USA in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.[11]

Social fragmentation. In the mechanism for assigning the transitional housing units little attention was given to the preservation of the social fabric. The result has been to enhance residents' sense of isolation, abandonment and powerlessness. Social surveys have revealed high levels of post-traumatic stress and depression, especially among women, unemployed people and the elderly. One consequence of the social fragmentation, as observed in social surveys, is an increase in xenophobia and the perception that foreigners have been given privileges in the assignment of housing.

Role of governance.[12] The social fragmentation forms part of a policy that appears to be characterised by divide and rule. Although there are emergent groups of citizens who fight for their rights and for a better future, participatory democracy has not been enhanced by the disaster. Instead, it has been replaced by government paternalism and central direction without significant devolution to local communities.

The fate of the damaged historical centres. A year and a half after the disaster the centre of L'Aquila remained off limits to ordinary citizens. Although there were problems with the removal of 4-5 million tonnes of rubble, it contained some of the most elaborate buttressing ever applied to earthquake-damaged buildings (Figure 4). The use of electro-soldering implies that the buttressing is designed to last for a very long time. Unfortunately, it cannot prevent the decay of the damaged urban fabric, only hold it in place. The result is a completely dysfunctional urban area, with services dispersed or absent, and points of reference left to decay behind the cordons.

Figure 4. Buttressing of a damaged building in L'Aquila city centre.

The context of the disaster

In the L'Aquila earthquake standard patterns of damage to buildings were reproduced an infinitum (Figure 5), suggesting that seismic vulnerability was not only widespread but absolutely endemic. Given the prevalence of earthquakes in the central Apennines, this represents a historical failure to promote and enforce adequate building codes: in fact, until recent revisions of the codes, L'Aquila was placed in the 'moderate seismicity' capacity despite having had, in 1703, an earthquake of estimated magnitude 6.7 that killed at least 6,000 residents and severely damaged most of the city's public buildings. Hence, there was no scientific justification for such laxity, which was doubtless the result of pressure by speculative builders.

Figure 5. Typical form of damage in reinforced concrete apartment building, L'Aquila.

One striking feature of the response to the L'Aquila earthquake is the lack of separation of civil protection from the business of recovery and reconstruction, a situation which is uncommon in other countries. For example, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake a special agency was set up to manage the recovery process.[13] In Italy, the national civil protection service seems to go through a cycle of scandals that repeats itself roughly once every ten years. The scandal of 2009-10 concerned the use of ordinances to accomplish public works, thus using emergency measures simply to bypass the stringent and cumbersome bureaucratic anti-corruption controls on the tendering process. Some €10.6 billion had been disbursed in this manner in eight years, some of it with very debatable justification.[4] Involvement of civil protection in the recovery process in L'Aquila thus tainted both sides rather than creating a workable symbiosis.

Disaster risk reduction: the report card

At the world scale, disaster risk reduction and resilience have become fashionable goals, in part thanks to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and its Hyogo Framework for Action.[14] This has five priorities for action and it is worth considering how Italy, and L'Aquila, have responded to them.

1. Ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation. An OECD evaluation shows that the institutional basis is strong in Italy at the national level but fragmentary and inadequate below that.1 This is particularly true of Abruzzo Region, where resources either do not exist or have not been sufficiently devoted to the problem. Only a handful of Italy's 8,104 municipalities have comprehensive disaster reduction plans, despite the fact that no other European country is as severely afflicted by calamity. In contrast to many other European countries, neither nationally nor locally is disaster risk reduction and the creation of resilience a significant priority.

2. Identify, assess and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning. In fundamental terms, risk is composed of two components: hazard and vulnerability. Hazard recognition and monitoring are highly developed in Italy, and that applies to the sector of the central Apennines in which L'Aquila is located. Vulnerability assessment is much less well developed and the is usually only applied to physical vulnerabilities (i.e. the probabilities of structural collapse), not socio-economic ones. At the international level, many experts regard vulnerability as the dominant component of disaster risk.[15]

3. Use knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels. Although civil protection has made considerable progress in recent years, and through voluntarism this has involved a proportion of the general public, there is little sign that a culture of safety and resilience is being created. Although there are initiatives to sensitise school children against risks, civil protection and disaster risk reduction are not part of the standard curriculum. Protection structures were particularly weak in Abruzzo at the time of the earthquake and remain so.

4. Reduce the underlying risk factors. This would require considerable investment in structural and non-structural measures. Although there has been some progress in structural protection, much remains to be done. Very little progress has been made in the implementation of non-structural measures. Business continuity management (BCM), for example, is almost completely lacking in large parts of Italy. The effects of this in L'Aquila meant that employment which could have been saved was lost.

5. Strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels. Some progress is being made, notably in the more progressive regions, such as Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy and Sicily. However, much remains to be done.

One can conclude from this brief evaluation that the disaster risk reduction situation in Italy is not promising. It is particularly bleak in Abruzzo. Above all there is a pervasive lack of planning and a corresponding inability to set strategic priorities for resilience.

Lessons learned?

Many publications include "lessons learned" in their titles.[16] However, to be truly learned a lesson must be both practically useful and incorporated in order to create better practice. That is too seldom the case.

The resettlement policy in L'Aquila has led to the replication of a number of problems that were encountered in other countries, notably Turkey, in the 1970s and at the time represented lessons genuinely to be learned.[17] One was the importance of planning in an integrated manner for all stages of the 'disaster cycle': mitigation (risk reduction), preparedness (including prediction and warning), emergency response, recovery and reconstruction. In Italy there is a tendency not to plan and not to understand the purpose of planning, which should enable rather than restrict by coordinating the rational use of resources. Another problem concerns the functionality of transitional settlements. At L'Aquila these are lacking in socio-economic resilience and planned according to criteria that are far too restrictive, especially regarding access to employment and services. Nor is there any indication that the longer term is being planned. Hence, if return to 'normality' involves reoccupation of the damaged urban fabrics, no one can tell when this will take place. The current strategy has apparently been designed under the assumption that it will not occur for decades.

In many places the occurrence of disaster opens a 'window of opportunity' for risk reduction. For example, in Iran the Manjil earthquake of 1990 and the Bam disaster of 2003 both led to step-like improvements in the country's disaster response.[18] It is striking that the L'Aquila earthquake did not lead to similar adjustments. Other parts of the country that have a similar earthquake risk, for example the Garfagnaga and Mugello in Tuscany, appear not to have benefited from a renewed interest in disaster reduction.

The L'Aquila earthquake can only be analysed satisfactorily in political terms (Figure 6), especially with regard to short-term voting behaviour resulting from government largesse and paternalism.[4] Governance and the mechanisms of social participation have been casualties of this emphasis. The main product has been a specious urbanisation, based on greenfield sites and as dependent on the private car as much of the American suburban sprawl of the mid-20th century. As current thinking is that disaster risk reduction must be integrated with sustainable resource usage (and it must be sustainable in its own right), the policies employed in Abruzzo may be regarded as storing up problems for the future, rather than solving them.

Figure 6. The political process of resettlement in L'Aquila.

Vulnerability is at the root of disaster risk. Most attempts to characterise it have concentrated on measuring it in a sectoral manner, for example in the social, economic, physical and cultural spheres. In a model I formulated some years ago[12,19], I identified six components, which can be evaluated with respect to the case of L'Aquila:-

Total vulnerability - life is generally precarious. This is not the case, as it applies mainly to places where poverty is an absolute quantity.

Economic vulnerability - people lack adequate occupation. This was the case before the 2009 earthquake and is doubly so in the aftermath when economic stagnation has set in and jobs have been lost en masse.

Technological/technocratic vulnerability - caused by the riskiness of technology. There is little sign that technology is an important source of vulnerability in L'Aquila.

Residual vulnerability - caused by lack of modernisation. This is a fundamental source of risk in the L'Aquila area, where lack of seismic retrofitting and lack of social participation and preparation are endemic.

Delinquent vulnerability - caused by corruption, negligence, etc. There is significant evidence, although none with scientific validity, that the L'Aquila earthquake was an opportunity for corruption and speculation. Although this aspect is by its very nature hard to evaluate, it seems that, rather than creating the conditions for improvement of safety, disaster in Italy opens a Pandora's box of negative outcomes by creating conditions that organised crime and corrupt people can exploit. At the same time, disaster tends to weaken structures designed to control speculation and crime, especially as the imperatives to get things done lead to the abbreviation of the relevant procedures.

Newly generated vulnerability - caused by changes in circumstances. As noted above, although the transitional settlement policy may have abated seismic risk, it may end up increasing social risk by creating fragmentation and isolation in the social fabric.

A change in attitudes and culture is urgently needed in order to reverse the trends described herein. The concept of resilience has succeeded in being accepted in places where it seemed far more foreign than it does in L'Aquila. A more locally based, socially inclusive policy of recovery would help it to be accepted there as well.

Acknowledgement

In the preparation of this article I gratefully acknowledge the help of the MICRODIS-L'Aquila research team: Caterina Antinori, Francesco Barbano, Anna Carbonelli, Vincenza Cofini, Christian Iasio, Michele Magni, Fausto Marincioni and Roberto Miniati.

References

[1] OECD 2010. Italy 2010: Review of the Italian National Civil Protection System (OECD Reviews of Risk Management Policies. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 173 pp.

[2] Alexander, D.E. 2010. The L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 and Italian Government policy on disaster response. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 2(4): 325-342.

[3] Gerhardt, R.T., J.S. McGhee, C. Cloonan, J.A. Pfaff and R.A. De Lorenzo 2001. U.S. Army MEDEVAC in the new millennium: a medical perspective. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 2(7): 659-664.

[4] Alexander, D.E. 2011. Civil protection amid disasters and scandals. In E. Pasotti and E. Gualmini (eds) Politica in Italia 2011 (Bologna), Italian Politics 2011 (San Francisco).

[5] Becker, N. 2009. Raising preparedness by risk analysis of post-disaster homelessness and improvement of emergency shelters. Disaster Prevention and Management 18(1): 49-54.

[6] Alexander, D.E., 1984. Housing crisis after natural disaster: the aftermath of the November 1980 southern Italian earthquake. Geoforum 15(4): 489-516.

[7] El-Anwar, O., K. El-Rayes and A. Elnashai 2010. Minimization of socioeconomic disruption for displaced populations following disasters. Disasters 34(3): 865-883.

[8] Haas, J.E., R.W. Kates and M.J. Bowden (eds) 1977. Reconstruction Following Disaster. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 331 pp.

[9] Stucchi, M., C. Meletti, G. Manfredi, M. Dolce (eds) 2009. L'Aquila, April 6th 2009, 3:32am. Progettazione Sismica 03: 1-256.

[10] Calvi, G.M. and V. Spaziante 2009. Reconstruction between temporary and definitive: the CASE project. Progettazione Sismica 03: 221-250

[11] Button, G.V.2006. Voices from the Astrodome and beyond: counternarrative accounts of disaster. Learning from Catastrophe: Quick Response Research in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. Special Publication no. 40, Natural Hazards Centre, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado: 429-442.

[12] Özerdem, A. and T. Jacoby 2006. Disaster Management and Civil Society: Earthquake Relief in Japan, Turkey and India. International Library of Postwar Reconstruction and Development no. 1.I.B. Tauris, London 142 pp.

[13] Cosgrave, J. and M. Herson 2008. Perceptions of crisis and response: a synthesis of evaluations of the response to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. ALNAP Seventh Review of Humanitarian Action. Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action, Overseas Development Institute, London, Chapter 4, p. 208.

[14] UNISDR 2005. Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities. United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, 22 pp.

[15] Birkmann, J. (ed.) 2006. Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo, 524 pp.

[16] e.g. Fallahi, A. 2007. Lessons learned from the housing reconstruction following the Bam earthquake in Iran. Australian Journal of Emergency Management 22(1): 26-35.

[17] Davis, I. 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford Polytechnic Press, Oxford, 127 pp.

[18] Amini Hosseini, K., M. Kazem Jafari, M. Hosseini, B. Mansouri and S. Hosseinioon 2009. Development of urban planning guidelines for improving emergency response capacities in seismic areas of Iran. Disasters 33(4): 645-664.

[19] Alexander, D.E. 1997. The study of natural disasters, 1977-97: some reflections on a changing field of knowledge. Disasters 21(4): 284-305.

Disasters in the New Baroque Age

2010-11-23T17:33:00.008+01:00

"Tell me, my man, what is the quickest way to Dublin?" "Well, to begin with, Sorr, I wouldn't start from here!"

As I write this, it is exactly 30 years to the hour since I was made homeless by the earthquake of 23 November 1980 in southern Italy. It prompts me to reflect on the role of history in our understanding of disasters.
In an old Hollywood costume drama film, a serf rushes into the king's chamber shouting "Your Majesty! Your Majesty! The Hundred Years' War has started!" That sense of crushing inevitability mixed with historical fallacy often pervades the study of disasters. In this ahistorical age we need to look back as well as forward. History does not repeat itself, but those people who ignore its lessons condemn themselves to relive at least some of its outcomes.
I argue that we live in the new Baroque age (Alexander 2000). The old Baroque age stretched, if you adopt a liberal definition, approximately from 1630 to 1750. It was a time of immense upheaval and change, a time of portentous disaster and of environmental transformation (Maravall 1979). It was characterised by a serious imbalance of wealth. At the same time it was a period of awakening, enlightenment and intense reactions to the social and intellectual strictures of organised religion. There was, nonetheless, conflict among the prevailing schools of thought about how to interpret the world. The intellectual ferment was fed by a tension of opposites, of which wealth versus crushing poverty was the greatest. This was stimulated by the sense of paradox brought by discovery and re-evaluation, on which the whole movement thrived. Symbolism had a paramount role in these processes. Yet the Baroque was not merely an artistic movement: it had distinctive economic, political and strategic characteristics, and distinctive disasters--floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues and famines. It was a period in which economic assets were gambled with, a fact that might remind us of the banking crisis of 2009, just as the other characteristics of the period should remind us of many aspects of life in the early 21st century.
As the industrial revolution prepared the ground for the late 20th century technological revolution, so the conquest of the New World paved the way, by supplying the wealth, for the paradoxes and excesses of the Baroque period.
The Baroque period ended in war and strife. It degenerated into subjugation and dictatorship, so soon to be manifest in bloody and destructive battles. Intellectually, it led to the resurgence of bigotry and pessimism. The parallels between the Baroque period and the present day are striking (Alexander 2002). From 1630 to 1750 was a period in which human populations struggled to come to terms with new technological and socio-economic realities, much like the present time.
Readers will have to forgive my Eurocentric interpretation, but it is justified by historians (e.g. Jones 2003).
We need to learn how to look back. The wrong way is to look back to the last disaster, instead of anticipating the next one, and that is sadly very common. The right way is to study history, including the history of attitudes and responses to disaster, in order to learn its lessons. This requires sophisticated interpretation. Unfortunately, we live in a world that instantly forgets its lessons: witness the huge loss in personal resilience in Western countries since 1945. The fate of the British expeditionary force in Afghanistan in 1840, and of the Soviet Army more recently, ought to have imparted a lesson regarding military involvement in that country in the 2000s.
The way to put the past behind us is not to ignore it, for sooner or later it will come back to haunt us. The preeminence of symbolism in the baroque period has extensive parallels in this modern age of symbolic mass communication. The return of bigotry and social restriction (now called fundamentalism), intensified by demographic pressures, has parallels in both periods.
The Baroque period ended badly. Its demise was marked by the cataclysm of the Lisbon earthquake, fire and tsunami of 1755. Its consequences were strife and bloodshed. The response was extremely pessimistic. There is still time to learn from such events and avoid the worst outcomes for the modern world. Pessimism is not yet necessary.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, U.K., and Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

Alexander, D.E. 2002. Nature's impartiality, man's inhumanity: reflections on terrorism and world crisis in a context of historical disaster. Disasters 26(1): 1-9.

Jones, E.L. 2003. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (3rd edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Maravall, J.A. 1979. La cultura de la crisis barocca. Historia 16: 80-90.

Italian Civil Protection Amid Privatisation and Scandals

2010-02-22T16:29:00.003+01:00

In 2004 the Israeli sociologist Avi Kirschenbaum published an interesting and authoritative book on disasters entitled Chaos, Organization, and Disaster Management.(1) The core of this volume presents the results of a well-conceived academic study of disaster preparedness in Kirschenbaum's home country: in this it is laudable but unremarkable. In contrast, the beginning and end of the book are both startlingly heretical. The first chapter draws attention to the huge increase in disasters in the last half of the twentieth century and suggests that it can be explained by corresponding increases in the number, size and importance of disaster management agencies, as these have sought to aggrandise the problem. Kirschenbaum's prescription is given in his last chapter: to privatise disaster management and make it a subscription service offered only to those who pay for it in advance.
Avi Kirschenbaum's book ought to be required reading for policy makers who deal with civil protection, but what would they make of it? It should be a sort of cod liver oil for disaster managers--foul tasting but good for them. In other words, rather than inducing the reader to advocate the privatisation of civil protection, it should stimulate him or her to marshal the arguments against such a move, and they are as numerous as they are powerful.
Suddenly, Kirschenbaum's book is highly relevant to Italy. On 30 December 2009, the Italian government emitted a decree-law (DL-195) to regulate the clear-up of toxic waste in Campania, a very necessary act, given the enormous damage to environment and health caused by years of mafia-controlled dumping in that region. Almost unnoticed in this legislative instrument, Article 16 turned the national civil protection organisation into a private company, with the Prime Minister as the only shareholder. For weeks before and after the publication of this law, politicians and the public devoted remarkably little attention to it. Employees affected by it demonstrated, and no one took any notice. Trade unions fulminated against it on their web pages, and no one noticed. Suddenly, more than six weeks after the publication of the decree, it all fell apart. The government retracted article 16 amid a welter of criticism and adverse publicity in the country's mass media.
By 2009, as a result of piecemeal legislation that left grey areas and superimposition of competencies and responsibilities, the need to do something about the Italian civil protection system had become acute, as was amply demonstrated during the aftermath of the L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009. However, as noted above, the arguments against privatisation as a solution are powerful, for example:-
• the reaction to disasters needs to be a collective responsibility of society
• privatisation sits very badly with the selfless ethic of voluntarism
• it is open to abuse by commercial interests and organised crime
• it would be unethical for a government-sponsored company to make profits out of disaster relief.
General Luigi Manfredi, Vice-President of the Rome-based think-tank ISPRO, conducted a penetrating analysis and published it on the Institute's website.(2) Among his arguments were the following:-
• Article 16 of DL-195 is vaguely worded regarding responsibilities and the provenance of funds for disaster relief and recovery.
• It represents a form of privatisation of the civil service, but without the safeguards for personnel inherent in public employment.
• The relationship between the national Department of Civil Protection (an appendage of the cabinet of ministers) and the new company is unclear, and hence the latter's loyalties could be divided.
• The decree could lead to assumption of power without adequate democratic controls, or at least to the complication of a chain of command that in reality needs to be simplified.
And then, equally suddenly and without warning, the government retracted Article 16 of the decree-law.
In point of fact, this is not the first time that something of the sort has happened in Italy. To begin with, modern civil protection had a difficult birth, as from 1982 until 1991 political polarisation inhibited the creation of a viable system. The left wing feared, not entirely without reason, that measures adopted to combat natural disasters could lead to abuses of power and, in the last resort, to a potential coup d'etat. Hence, for many years the status of the country's disaster management organisation varied: a department of the Ministry of the Interior, a Ministry in its own right under a Minister without portfolio... And in 1999 measures were enacted to make it an autonomous agency, perhaps modelled on the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, but potentially even more independent of central government control. For three months in early 2000 the agency actually existed, and then it succumbed. Meanwhile, much responsibility for civil protection had gone to the regions as part of the devolution of Italy, fruit of the Bassanini law of 1998. Clearly, successive Italian governments have been torn between the desire to conserve power at the centre and that to offload responsibility to lower levels of government, and also between the desire to have a civil protection organisation under prime ministerial control or one that has full autonomy of action. The result is a mess which has done much to diminish public confidence in how the state performs in times of disaster. Rather than leaving citizens contented and feeling protected, they have acquired a dog's dinner of conflicting strategies, policies and legislation. As they say, "è stata una cosa all'italiana"--done in the Italian style.
Civil protection, or emergency preparedness, is as susceptible to corruption and scandal as any other field of public activity. In the USA the early years of FEMA were marked by accusations against its leaders, who were periodically driven into resignation. A detailed political analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (after August 2005) painted a desperate picture of croneyism and incompetence in FEMA and its post-9/11 parent organisation, the US Department of Homeland Security.(3)
In Italy, many will remember the scandal that broke in August 1999 over the alleged misappropriation of funds and relief goods destined for the mission to Albania in favour of refugees displaced by the Kosovo war. Despite the flimsiness and inaccuracy of the allegations, several key officials were forced out of office, including the Undersecretary of State for Civil Protection. Conspiracy theorists, who abound in Italy, would regard this as a political means of effecting regime change in the civil protection hierarchy. It worked.
Currently, as I write, things are in a state of flux. Accusations are flying about corruption in the apportionment of contracts for the post-seismic reconstruction of L'Aquila. Once again, the accusations seem to be little more than business as it is normally conducted in Italy. The aftermath of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, which affected 637 municipalities, led to corruption on such a scale that it has been suggested that only 25 per cent of the vast sums of money allocated to reconstruction actually reached the beneficiaries' This is remarkable for how little scandal it generated, not how much.
My fear is that we are in the middle of another attempt at regime change in the civil protection hierarchy. Currently, there is little sign of innovation or improvement in the system, which badly needs to be clarified, simplified and brought up to date. This is unlikely to happen amid a welter of legislation and counter-legislation.

Notes

(1) Kirschenbaum, A. 2004. Chaos, Organization, and Disaster Management. Marcel Dekker, New York, 328 pp.
(2) Manfredi, Gen. Luigi 2010. Una nuova società di stato. ISPRO, Istituto di Studio della Protezione Civile, Roma, www.ispro.it (accessed 20 February 2010).
(3) Cooper, C., R.J. Block and R. Block 2006. Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. Times Books, New York, 333 pp.

Reflections on the Haiti earthquake of 12 January 2010

2010-01-15T18:53:00.000+01:00

As I write, a major earthquake has once again caused devastation in yet another country afflicted by poverty and destitution. Haiti is a country of ten million inhabitants, the poorest in the western hemisphere, ranked 149 out of 182 in UNDP's Human Development Index, with a per capita GDP of $610, a life expectancy at birth of 61 years and an adult literacy rate of 62 per cent. The statistics are too arid to say much about the suffering. Moreover, Haiti has frequent floods and occasional hurricanes, such as Jeanne in 2004. It had no major earthquake between 1770 and 2010, but that is typical of seismic 'gaps' at the tectonic plate margins, areas where strain builds up to the point of a mighty rupture.

The 12 January 2010 earthquake was powerful (M=7.1), shallow in its focus (initial point of rupture in the earth's crust) and with an epicentre only 16 km from Port au Prince, a metropolitan area that contains one fifth of the national population. As I write, three days after the earthquake, there is no indication of the magnitude of the death toll. It will probably never be known in detail, such are the problems of record-keeping in places like Haiti.

Whereas major disasters may absorb something like 0.2 per cent of the resources of a rich country, the proportion may be orders of magnitude larger in poor nations. Both Haiti and Nicaragua have had their economic development set back by decades as a result of the devastation caused by natural disasters, including the loss of employment and infrastructure, and the unsustainable burden of recovery. In fact, with the addition of political and military instability, and corruption, some parts of Managua have never been reconstructed after the 1972 earthquake.

On the positive side, the occurrence of a major natural catastrophe--a politically neutral phenomenon--is a good opportunity to reinforce processes of reconciliation and governance-building by international "disaster diplomacy". On the other hand, the international community has not shown much interest in investing heavily in disaster prevention, even after major events have graphically demonstrated the needs. For example, when eight Caribbean and Central American nations were affected by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 the rich countries organized an aid package that cost less than three per cent of what they were spending rescuing hedge fund investors--i.e. unsuccessful financial market gamblers--on Wall Street. One can only hope that the new emphasis on disaster risk reduction in the arrangements for managing climate change at the world level will have some positive fallout for earthquake damage prevention.

Vulnerability to disaster is an innate property of people and things that is difficult to measure. By analogy, like friction it is mobilised by events: hence, it materialises as impact when hazards become disasters. Suddenly, the seismic vulnerability of Haiti is revealed in the aftermath of a catastrophic disaster that has caused wholesale destruction on a scale that is seen relatively rarely (Tehran, Istanbul, Kathmandu and Tokyo are among the few places that could end up surpassing it). In Port au Prince many of the main strategic buildings have collapsed, including the National Palace, the Pétionville Hospital and the UN MINUSTAH headquarters. The shanty towns of the poor are devastated in a manner that is seldom seen in more substantial, more permanent forms of vernacular housing. Loss of life has been devastating, not merely among ordinary citizens, but also among key foreign and domestic personnel. One can only hope that the international community will mainstream disaster risk reduction and help Haiti to rebuild an infrastructure in which the key elements resist impacts sufficiently to enable the rest to be saved in future disasters.

Up to 90 per cent of the deaths that occur in earthquakes fall in the world's poorest countries and regions. The only reason that these areas do not account for the largest proportion of the costs of damage is the poverty of their assets: hence, sums of money are no measure of the degree of suffering. Poverty and disaster vulnerability are not quite synonyms. For example, some of the poorer villages of Nepal have become quite organized to defend themselves against floods and landslides. Human ingenuity has enabled at least some poor communities to better their circumstances and create their own resilience. Good governance is the key to progress. Regardless of the financial constraints, a sense of participatory self-determination is always beneficial to disaster risk reduction. Civil society, public administration and businesses need to work together under the precepts of the Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005-2015, the United Nations' blueprint for disaster reduction. The example of Afghanistan (another of the world's most seismically hazardous countries) is seminal. Lack of security, stability and governance has effectively prevented the creation of civil protection structures and the only in-place alternative is mere improvisation.

The international community is sensitive to the issue of major natural disasters. Moreover, with climate change, sea-level rise and the intensification of meteorological phenomena, it is clear that disasters will be larger and more devastating in the future unless resilience is boosted. However, although there has been much discussion of the need to switch from reacting to disasters after they have occurred to instituting prior prevention measures, this has hardly begun to happen. Thus the earthquake of 2001 in El Salvador was in many ways a repeat of the 1986 Salvadorian earthquake, including in some of the relief measures.

Restricting the discussion to the most immediate forms of assistance, the convergence of up to 2000 foreign search-and-rescue specialists from all parts of the globe, necessary as it may be under the circumstances, is simply not an efficient way of saving the lives of people trapped and injured by earthquakes. Few rescuers arrive before 36 hours have gone by and average survival times under rubble are usually well under 24 hours, perhaps below 12 hours, depending on local conditions. The cost per life saved of foreign rescue, medical and field hospital resources is extremely high relative to what could be achieved if capacity were available locally. As we know very well where the world's biggest natural disasters are likely to occur, it is time that a concerted international effort were made to encourage local preparedness. If it cannot begin with prevention, then at least let us build up the capacity to react locally. This means transfer of technology, equipment, expertise and training to where they are likely to be needed, plus efforts to ensure that readiness is permanently maintained. This is sustainable disaster preparedness: it needs willpower, organization, tenacity, generosity and undivided attention. Unless those qualities are forthcoming from the international community, the next major disaster will bring forth the same dreary story, in which predictable miseries are described as if they were unexpected and unfathomable.

Disasters: the Symbolist Manifesto

2009-11-01T18:56:00.000+01:00

Figure 1. Meaning and acceptance of disaster in historical context.

Figure 2. Metemorphosis of culture in the context of interpreting disaster.

Modernism and post-modernism

Since 1920 an impressive body of disaster research has built up in the social sciences. Cultural ecology and social adaptation to risk have been studied in great depth (Oliver-Smith 1998); so have social relations in disaster (Perry and Quarantelli 2005) and perception of hazards (Johnson and Covello 1987). However, the body of theory may be large and authoritative, but much of it relates to a world that has been swept away by the march of history. The heyday of theory production in hazard and disaster research extended from the mid-1960s to the 1970s (Barton 1970, White 1974). In this period the canons of human ecology and social relations in disaster were established (Burton et al. 1978). Since then, the world has moved on and many dearly-held tenets of research have been called into question by the relentless tide of information and communications technology, globalisation, promotion of ideology, and environmental imperatives. It is time to update theory to reflect the new realities of the 21st century world.

There have, of course, been attempts to tackle this problem. Mark Pelling (2003) called for theory that can help us understand and interpret globalisation. Some years earlier Ulrich Beck published his theory of the risk society (Beck 1992) and, as it is considered to be the principal post-modern theory of risk, it has been debated ever since. However, I argue that we do not live in a risk society: we live in a vulnerability society. There is a fundamental difference between the two perspectives: the former looks at society as technocracy from above, the latter from below, from the point of view of the vulnerable, the inveterate risk takers not the people who exercise choice.

Technology can lead us to a new post-modern interpretation of risk and disaster concerned with the ways in which it propagates meaning. Modern life involves vast new challenges in the search for meaning, huge perturbations in the human condition. Symbolism is a form of iconography or semiotics. It involves meaning as reduced to symbols, or concentrated and encapsulated in them (Jung 1964).

In recent decades the volume, flux and scope of the information that is available to people have all increased beyond any reasonable means of measurement. Unless technological collapse were to occur--which does not currently appear probable--the increase is set to continue. The pace of change is exemplified by the geometric progression in the calculating and memory power of integrated microcircuits ("Moore's law"--after Moore 1965). Humanity cannot adapt fast enough to the consequences of such changes. Full-scale adaptation would require the wholesale abandonment of cultures and large accretions of beliefs. It would require people spontaneously to free themselves from credos and superstitions, which has never yet occurred in human history.

Instead, inherited beliefs can condition people's view of disaster. At the root of this, natural calamity was once seen in a very narrow view symbolic manner based on judgement, retribution and portents (Figure 1). This constitutes one common aspect of the inherited cultural background that fuses with modern etic (i.e. universal) cultures in the process of cultural metamorphosis that is so important to the ways in which risk and disaster are perceived (Figure 2).

One of the most striking changes of the early 21st century is the realisation that problems can be solved by the instantaneous application of concepts and techniques developed very far away, through information and communications technology. This is the concept of real time. In the 1960s the geographer William Bunge (1966) started a conceptual revolution in his discipline by showing that spatial relationships were no longer literal and defined by distance in a geopolitical world in which the war front could be anywhere that an intercontinental ballistic missile could reach. The nuclear threat has relaxed, or perhaps merely changed, but Bunge's geographical topology has since become vastly more complex and significant. It is now relatively easy to involve oneself in the affairs of distant places and to make instantaneous connections.

In a highly networked world we cannot make sense of vast fluxes of information without symbolism. The pressure to interpret information has become so intense that we are creating a cartoon world of stylised relationships. It is highly amenable to symbolic interpretation, which is constantly facilitated by the accelerating pace of life.

Nonetheless, older views of disaster survive unscathed and thus coexist with the new (Figure 2). In the modern world vast populations survive with no piped water or electricity supplies. Yet even in such cases technological change has not been completely absent. Mobile telephony and internet access, for example, have penetrated some highly unlikely places. Cultural metamorphosis with a technological basis may be proceeding at different speeds in different places, but it is inevitable. It paves the way for new forms of symbolism. Perhaps it will turn out that the greatest luminary of disaster studies in the 20th century was the psychologist Karl Jung (1964).

The value of a symbolic interpretation

The first benefit is, of course, a greater understanding of people's perception of and relationships with disaster. No orders can be issued and effectively acted upon, no laws will successfully protect society, without taking into account people's perceptions, because these are what govern their predilections, choices and actions.

In the first place, symbolism equates with money. People will spend their wealth on things that have high symbolic value. The positive aspects of this involve donation, acquisition and economic support. In a negative manner there can be disequilibrium in investments and expenditures and support for inefficient forms of risk aversion (Peterson 2002). Governments will spend money because voters demand action, and that too can be related to symbolic interpretations. For example, accidents in the transportation field have had significant impacts on expenditure to reduce risks and increase safely, in some cases quite independently of the technical and economic arguments for investment but merely because public perception demands that particular ghosts be laid (Perrow 1984).

Secondly, symbolism encapsulates the essence of meaning. In the 21st century world old certainties have been swept away. Let us not underestimate the importance of the search for meaning in countless human lives that are caught in the resulting melee. One of the weakest, yet most pervasive forms of symbolism is numericism, love of numbers, or quantification of all things. Targets, statistics and quantities are a constant accompaniment to modern life. Sometimes they are vital or at least valuable, sometimes they are misleading or fraudulent. Amid the spread of rationalism--sometimes specious rationalism--measurements are the tools of influence, and sometimes the facilitators of modern conflict. In the worst case quantification is a damaging form of obfuscation (Alexander 2000). In the best case it can offer overwhelmingly convincing arguments for action and change. Through its reductive nature it is, however, one of the forms of symbolism.

Thirdly, over the last 60 years celebrity has become the life blood of mass media communication. Its power should not be underestimated. Celebrity has become a substitute for local curiosity. For many people it represents the idealised projection of their own personae, or at least the object of their fascination. In the modern world celebrity is increasingly powerful. In the most extreme cases it amounts to a pseudo-democratic form of unelected leadership. In many instances elected representatives are seen as less able, and less responsive, than entertainment celebrities, who have gradually increased their position as foci of change. Celebrity is intimately linked with popular and political views of disaster (Bronfen 2001). Moreover, celebrity is redolent with symbolism, much of it heavily manufactured by the entertainment industry and cultural organisations through astute use of the mass media.

Thus, symbolism can embody people's hopes, aspirations, fears and phobias, and a significant portion of their beliefs.

How can we use the symbolic interpretation in favour of disaster risk reduction?

First of all, it should be treated as a factor to reckon with. Media mean money. So do opinions, beliefs, communications and all the paraphernalia by which symbolism is propagated. Decoding symbolism is the key to how people react to risk and disaster--as risk takers, victims, donors, decision-makers, and so on. That process is the key to interpretation for policy, planning and action in disaster risk reduction and emergency response.

Symbolism could be used positively. Disaster risk is becoming increasing salient. In commercial culture branding and marketing have become so pervasive and spread so far that symbolism is the essence of commercial activity. Unwittingly, people have become accustomed to it. It has become second nature and the power of brands is overwhelming. In the same manner symbolism can be used to produce and promote a culture of risk reduction.

Conclusions

Symbolism is potentially the key to a new post-modern understanding of the social impact of disasters. This could be achieved by interpreting the role of symbolism in conditioning the pervasive new means of mass communication. Much work needs to be done to codify and amplify such interpretations and to consolidate the model. However, as profound changes in the technological underpinnings of modern life have occurred, the pace of cultural metamorphosis has accelerated. It is therefore imperative that new theory be made to help us understand the social, cultural and economic impacts of disaster in the 21st century.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, U.K., and Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

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

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

Bronfen, E. 2001. Fault lines: catastrophe and celebrity culture. European Studies 16: 117-139.

Bunge, W.W. 1966. Theoretical Geography. Lund Studies in Geography. Gleerup, Lund.

Burton, I., Kates, R.W. and White, G.F. 1978. The Environment as Hazard. Oxford University Press, New York; 2nd edition: 1993, Guilford Press, New York.

Johnson, B.B., and V.T. Covello (eds) 1987. The Social and Cultural Construction of Risk: Essays on Risk Perception and Selection. D. Reidel, Dordrecht.

Jung, C.G. and associates 1964. Man and His Symbols. Doubleday, Garden City, New York.

Moore, G.E. 1965. Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics Magazine 38(8), 4 pp.

Oliver-Smith, A. 1998. Disasters, social change, and adaptive systems. In Quarantelli, E.L. (ed.) What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. Routledge, London: 231-233.

Pelling, M. (ed.) 2003. Natural Disasters and Development in a Globalizing World. Routledge, London 250 pp.

Perrow, C. 1984. Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies. Basic Books, New York.

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

Peterson, M. 2002. The limits of catastrophe aversion. Risk Analysis 22(3): 527-538.

White, G.F. 1974. Natural hazards research: concepts, methods, and policy implications. In White, G.F. (ed.) Natural Hazards: Local, National and Global. Oxford University Press, New York: 3-16.

Mortality and Morbidity Risk in the L'Aquila Earthquake and Some Lessons to be Learned

2009-05-06T17:54:00.000+02:00

The L'Aquila earthquake (Mw=6.3) occurred at 03.32 hrs local time when most people were sleeping. Analyses of world-wide patterns of casualties suggest that between 50 and 90 per cent of deaths in earthquakes occur between midnight and 6 a.m. (as seismic casualty data are notoriously irregular, the difference depends on the period to which records pertain--Alexander 1996, Jones et al. 1990). Studies in central America and Turkey highlight the importance of vernacular housing as a source of risk in nocturnal earthquakes, or, indeed, whenever people are likely to be at home (Glass et al. 1977, Angus 1997, Rodriguez 2005). That is equally true in Italy (De Bruycker et al. 1983, 1985) where the only buildings that are more vulnerable to collapse (and may on occasion be fully occupied) are ecclesiastical ones. Some of them are very large, extremely old, poorly maintained and lacking in seismic retrofit provisions.

Examination of patterns of damage in the L'Aquila earthquake suggests that it may be possible to create model damage scenarios to help examine the question of earthquake survivability. Two examples follow.

Model URM vernacular dwelling. A typical unreinforced masonry (URM) single family vernacular dwelling in a village (such as Onna) or small town of Abruzzo Region might have the following characteristics:-
* two or three storeys with an independent entrance but bounded laterally by other dwellings
* rubble masonry vertical load-bearing walls 30-40 cm thick consisting of angular limestone fragments bound together with soft lime mortar and cement rendered or covered with stucco
* hard spots caused by localised repairs, usually about 1-3 sq. metres in size
* weak zones located primarily between apertures, at roof level and at corners, or connected with utility channels and chimney recesses in walls
* a heavy roof consisting of a concrete base or assemblage of concrete, steel joists and hollow terracotta tiles overlain with asphalt sheeting and terracotta pantiles; alternatively one laid upon longitudinal wooden beams of 20-20 cm section and spacing approximately 1 m
* chimneys may consist of precast cement segments that detach and collapse during the shaking.

The ancient practice of using courses of tiles in rubble walls, which was started by the Romans and continued until the early 20th century, could be seen in a minority of buildings in L'Aquila province. It contributed to their cohesion but not to the extent of providing full anti-seismic protection.

As it weakened heavy masonry walls that lacked basic structural integrity, the practice of carving channels in walls for plumbing and electrical lines (chasements) led to many failures during the 6 April 2009 earthquake. Recesses and channels for chimneys had a similar effect.

Many failures in URM buildings were connected with mixed construction, as where rubble masonry in the original building was augmented by brick, cement block or concrete alterations (or even all three). Differing stiffness, compressibility and weight of these components would tend to complicate a building's reaction to seismic stresses.

Model RC vernacular dwelling. A typical reinforced concrete (RC) vernacular dwelling in an Abruzzo town or in L'Aquila city might be characterised as follows:-
* a three-to-five storey multiple-family condominium with a communal entrance and communal stairs
* use of smooth reinforcing bars (until the 1970s); over-economical usage and poor positioning of stirrups, poor design or construction of joints
* a heavy concrete roof with tile overlay
* hollow-brick infill wall panels that are poorly tied to the frame and may fall out or inwards
* thin, hollow-brick internal partition walls.

As a result of racking of the frame, infill wall panels tended to detach from the frame and fall in or out, perhaps fragmented by X-shaped cracking. Similarly, partition walls fractured and collapsed inside the buildings. Racking also causes pounding, fracturing and torsion at structural nodes. In some cases, the stairs detached from supports and collapsed. Finally, there were instances of heavy damage to plaster, ceilings and fixtures and overturning of furniture.

In L'Aquila there were many examples of incipient (or actual) mid-floor failure in multi-storey RC dwellings. This is indicative of inadequate stiffness with inertial effects above coupled with heavy displacement below. The latter may have been affected by seismic wave amplification in alluvial or lacustrine sediments or topographic amplification on convex hillslopes. In many cases this did not lead to collapse of the building but internal damage (i.e. to partition and infill walls) was very substantial.

With regard to both sorts of dwelling the modern practice of laying terracotta tiles on asphalt sheeting, such that the only things that secure them are weight and interlocking friction, led to the displacement of large numbers of tiles into the street. The lightest form of roofing tile used in Italy (20 x 36 cm) weighs about 1 kg, which amounts to 15 kg/m2. Curved pantiles are at least 60-100 per cent heavier than this. It is thus easy for heavy agglomerations of tiles to cascade over the edge of roofs into the street and to take cornices, balcony stonework and façade details with them.

Buildings that were not damaged to the point of partial or total collapse showed surprisingly little breakage of window glass. In other earthquakes this has been a factor in injuring people who rushed outside without adequate footwear. Likewise, collapse of light fittings was not widespread enough to create a significant glass splinter hazard.

Damage and the potential to improve instantaneous self-protective reaction

Given the complexity of failure patterns in vernacular housing it is reasonable to suppose that there is no single self-protective behaviour that would be appropriate under all scenarios for damage. Despite the controversy over the predictability of the L'Aquila earthquake,[1] it remained unexpected and very few people were prepared for it when it happened.

The obstacles to immediate and short-term earthquake preparedness fall into six categories:-
* experience: people may lack experience or have had no direct contact with the problem
* adaptability: people may fail to adapt or even perceive the need to adapt to the seismic threat
* perception may be insufficient to enable a person to understand the problem well enough to be motivated to act
* social: failure to communicate, associate and learn
* economic: failure or inability to accumulate money and invest in protection
* organisational: lack of social structure and incentive to act.

Factors that increase the risk of injury in the case of rapid exit from a building include the following:-
* battering by adjacent structures
* collapse of URM walls, as coherent slabs or in fragments
* detachment of roofs
* detachment and collapse of pinnacles, balustrades and chimneys
* demolition by falling masonry of balconies and façade details that jut out
* separation of URM walls from roofs, with collapse of cornices and upper masonry
* ejection of infill walls in RC buildings
* detachment and collapse of corners in URM buildings
* detachment and collapse of stairs
* racking distortion of apertures.

On the other hand, these are some of the factors that increase the risk of injury in the case of deciding to remain inside a building:-
* battering by detached horizontal members (wooden roof beams and steel floor joists)
* torsion, distortion and shattering of nodes in RC buildings
* detachment of roofs
* bulging and reticular cracking of walls, with detachment of rendering and stucco and eventual collapse of the structure
* X-shaped, diagonal or reticulated cracking in the weak zones between apertures
* implosion of infill walls in RC buildings and collapse of internal partition walls
* damage to ceilings and internal fittings and overturning of furniture.

In heavily damaged buildings in L'Aquila there was little indication that the "triangle of life" would have helped to save people from crush injuries or being buried by dust and rubble. Neither would sheltering under tables or desks.

The "triangle of life" has been vigorously promoted by the American Rescue Team (see www.amerrescue.org) but equally vigorously contested by other protagonists (Lopes 2004). It involves sheltering next to large, robust objects that block the collapse of beams and slabs and leave a triangular cavity in which a person may shelter (relatively) unscathed. In general, complete collapse of a frame building may leave some void spaces, perhaps 10-15 per cent of the resulting mound of rubble, but they can easily fill with cement, gypsum or mortar dust and fragments. Examination of the partial and total collapse of buildings in L'Aquila city and Onna suggested that the "triangle of life" approach would have been ineffective as few such cavities were present.

There is some--albeit circumstantial--evidence that when buildings were being heavily damaged the best spontaneous action would have been to retreat further inside. Running into the street would put people significantly at risk from falling masonry or the collapse of stairways. In any case, rapid egress was made difficult by doors that jammed as a result of racking distortion.

In consideration of the types and levels of damage caused in the L'Aquila earthquake, risk of death or injury can be related to damage level on the following five-point scale:-

1. Damage level: minimal indoor damage to walls, fixtures and fittings.
Personal risk: for most people, prudent behaviour ensures freedom from injury.

2. Damage level: significant damage to structure and fittings.
Personal risk: risk of moderate injury but no significant risk of death.

3. Damage level: pervasive damage and collapse of architectural details.
Personal risk: significant risk of serious injury but low risk of death.

4. Damage level: major damage and limited partial collapse.
Personal risk: strong risk of serious injury and significant risk of death.

5. Damage level: collapse of more than 50 per cent of the structure.
Personal risk: limited probability of survival.

Independently of any question of making buildings safer by retrofitting them, it would be possible to create a strategy to survive earthquakes while at home--at least under ideal circumstances of perception and commitment of householders. This would involve making an educated guess about the probable seismic behaviour of a vernacular dwelling and planning to react accordingly. The following steps are proposed:-

* Identify and avoid the riskiest forms of behaviour, such as running blindly out of the house.
* Develop criteria to identify the safest place in the house--i.e. the most robust place with the least risk of collapse--in the light of the following considerations:
- potential for detachment and displacement of roof tiles or the entire roof
- stability of cornices and external balusters
- degree of support of staircases
- possibility of battering interference with adjacent buildings that are different in size, shape and construction and thus have different fundamental periods
- heterogeneity of materials and potential for interference or complex behaviour.
* Create an egress procedure, considering the difficulties of exiting a building in an environment characterised by high levels of damage and precariousness. The procedure should identify the nearest safe refuge and assembly area.
* Identify the most dangerous places in the house and plan to withdraw from them.
* Create a mutual support network of relatives, friends and neighbours.
* Assemble a cache of small-scale emergency equipment and materials (torch, radio, hard hat, water sterilisation pills, etc).
* Instruct and train family members and ensure that drills are practiced.

The presence of an elementary school in the middle of the urban area in Onna that was of new construction and which resisted the earthquake without damage is an indication of the importance of such buildings as the potential location of command posts, points of refuge for the population and reception centres for people who cannot return home. Ideally, each neighbourhood or village should have such a building. It should specifically be designated as multi-function and should be equipped accordingly.

Scenarios for earthquakes at other times of day

Since pioneering work in Chile in 1960 (Lomnitz 1970) it has been well-known that aggregate patterns of human behaviour can have a very substantial impact on the totals and patterns of earthquake injury epidemiology. In this respect it is interesting to speculate on what the situation would have been if the L'Aquila earthquake had occurred at another time of day (and on a holiday or working day).

In the L'Aquila earthquake there was an overall death/injury ratio of 0.20 (305 deaths--plus two related heart attack fatalities--and about 1500 recorded injuries)[2], which is relatively low for medium-to-large earthquakes (0.33 has been hypothesised--PAHO 1981). The case fatality rates of 0.17 overall and 0.60 for serious and critical (hospitalised) injuries are low in the first case and high in the second, as the ratio of serious to all injuries was only 0.13, which is somewhat small by comparison with similar earthquakes elsewhere (commonly it might be 0.15-0.25).

Would it have been much different if the earthquake had occurred at another time of day or not on a Sunday or holiday?

Damage to religious buildings was serious enough that if the tremors had occurred during Sunday mass (as happened at Lisbon in 1755--Chester, 2001--and in Irpinia-Basilicata, southern Italy, in 1980--De Bruycker et al. 1985) death tolls among congregations would inevitably have been high. The spontaneous collapse of the vaulting of the Upper Basilica in Assisi after the 1997 Umbria-Marche earthquake swarm crushed four people to death and provided a clear illustration of what could happen to congregations. Moreover, 81 died in the collapse of the church in Balvano, Potenza Province in 1980. Like many churches in the Province of L'Aquila it lacked any significant resistance to seismic acceleration.

Damage to public buildings was substantial but, with the exception of the Prefecture (Palazzo del Governo), which largely collapsed, it appears to have been less than that inflicted upon vernacular housing. However, cornice collapse and shedding of rubble and roofing material into streets could have caused a significant number of fatalities and injuries (including people in cars) if the streets had been busily occupied rather than deserted, especially in the commercial cores of the city and neighbouring towns. This alone might have led to an even greater death toll.

Significant non-structural damage occurred to the L'Aquila city bus station, a steel-framed building with brick cladding. However, it is only a one-storey building and if it had been full of people there would probably have been significant injuries but few or no deaths.

Serious damage occurred to commercial and industrial premises, but in these injury tolls would probably have been limited by low density of occupancy. However, at the main hospital in L'Aquila there was significant potential for a greater number of injuries if the earthquake had occurred during the day when many more people would have been using this complex of buildings. As the damage was limited to cladding, ceiling fixtures and walls, no one died in the hospital and that would probably still have been the case if it had been more fully occupied. Nevertheless, injuries might have been concentrated around the main staircase, where damage was more substantial as a result of interference between the two structural masses of the building. Had the earthquake been stronger or more prolonged, the stairs might have collapsed and at certain times of day they could easily have been full of people trying to escape the tremors.

Distribution of fatalities in the L'Aquila earthquake

The economic viability of human settlements in Abruzzo is often related to their demographic growth or decline. Generally, the smaller, more rural or isolated settlements lose population to the larger ones where economic opportunity is greater. In Abruzzo Region a total of 81 municipalities were affected by the earthquake, and 49 of them were inserted into the Prime Ministerial Decree regarding damage of MCS intensities VI-IX.[3] Although there is considerable statistical variation (relating mainly to employment opportunities in the L'Aquila area and close to the Adriatic Sea coast and its access roads), the break-even point that divides decline from growth (measured on the basis of changes over the period 2001-7) is a population of about 1,500, which is the same as it was at the time of the last significant earthquake in the region (Alexander 1986). It is interesting to note that the eight municipalities in which fatalities occurred are all growing, on average by a healthy 3.7 per cent per decade. If deaths can be connected with building collapse in areas of poor quality housing, demographic stagnation is certainly not a factor.

The distribution of the 305 deaths involves a relatively circumscribed area 24 x 11 km in size. The density of population plays some role, as does the geotechnical and geomorphological setting, especially regarding soft sediments and piedmont location.

In considering the age and gender pattern of fatalities, it is of note that they are dominated by the 20-29 and over 70s age groups. The prevalence of mortality among old people is a common feature of major earthquakes (Liang et al. 2001), as they are less mobile, less perceptive and more frail than younger people, and they may live, as pensioners, in poorer quality housing. Moreover, the preponderance of female over male victims among the over-70s probably reflects nothing more than the greater longevity of women. However, the peak in the 20-29 age group is interesting and corresponds to findings from the Kobe earthquake of January 1995 (Osaki and Minowa 2001). This group is highly active but may lack experience of earthquakes and have little idea about what to do during them. Finally, there is a gender bias in the data that cannot be explained purely by the longevity of women. On average 43 men died to every 50 women. If the over 70s are excluded, the figure remains 47.5 men to 50 women. It begs further investigation.

References

Alexander, D.E. 1986. Disaster preparedness and the 1984 earthquakes in central Italy. Working Paper 55, Natural Hazards Center, Boulder, Colorado, 90 pp.

Alexander, D.E. 1996. The health effects of earthquakes in the mid-1990s. Disasters 20(3): 231-247.

Angus, D.C. 1997. Epidemiologic assessment of mortality, building collapse pattern, and medical response after the 1992 earthquake in Turkey. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 12: 222-234.

Chester, D. K. 2001. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Progress in Physical Geography 25(3): 363-383.

De Bruycker, M., D. Greco, I. Annino, M.A. Stazi, N. De Ruggiero, M. Triassi, Y.P. De Kettenis and M.F. Lechat 1983. The 1980 earthquake in southern Italy: rescue of trapped victims and mortality. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 61(6): 1021-1025.

De Bruycker, M., Greco, D. and Lechat, M.F., 1985. The 1980 earthquake in southern Italy: mortality and morbidity. International Journal of Epidemiology 14: 113-117.

Glass, R.I., Urrutia, J.J., Sibony, S., Smith, H., Garcia, B. and Rizzo, L., 1977. Earthquake injuries related to housing in a Guatemalan village. Science 197: 638-643.

Jones, N.P., E.K. Noji, F. Krimgold and G.S. Smith 1990. Considerations in the epidemiology of earthquake injuries. Earthquake Spectra 6: 507-528.

Liang, N.J., Y-T. Shih, F-Y. Shih, H-M. Wu, H-J. Wang, S-F.Shi, M-Y. Liu and B.B. Wang 2001. Disaster epidemiology and medical response in the Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan. Annals of Emergency Medicine 38(5): 549-555.

Lomnitz, C. 1970. Casualties and behaviour of populations during earthquakes. Bulletin of Seismological Society of America 60: 1309-1313.

Lopes, R. 2004. American Red Cross response to 'Triangle of Life' by Doug Copp. http://www.bpaonline.org/Emergencyprep/arc-on-doug-copp.html

Osaki, Y. and M. Minowa 2001. Factors associated with earthquake deaths in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, 1995. American Journal of Epidemiology 153(2): 153-156.

PAHO 1981. A Guide to Emergency Health Management After Natural Disasters. Pan American Health Organization, Washington, D.C.

Rodriguez, M.E. 2005. Evaluation and design of masonry dwellings in seismic zones. Earthquake Spectra 21(2): 465-492.

[1] See "Earthquake at L'Aquila, central Italy", http://www.emergency-planning.blogspot.com
[2] A complete list of victims has been published and repeatedly updated by the newspaper Il Centro, see: http//
racconta.kataweb.it/terremotoabruzzo/index.php?sorting=morto_frazione,morto_comune,cognome&cerca=cerca
[3] DPCM no.3 of 16-4-2009, " Individuazione dei comuni danneggiati dagli eventi sismici che hanno colpito la provincia dell'Aquila ed altri comuni della regione Abruzzo il giorno 6 aprile 2009." Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Rome.

Earthquake at L'Aquila, Central Italy

2009-04-08T10:18:00.000+02:00

The event

On Monday 6 April 2009 at 03.32 local time an earthquake of magnitude Mw=6.3 and hypocentral depth 8.8 km occurred with an epicentre a few kilometres southeast of the city of L'Aquila (population 73,000). Some 294 people were killed. Of the 1500 people wounded, at least 10 per cent were seriously injured. Damage has been reported in 49 municipalities and is serious in 16 of them (containing many small villages). About 28,000 people were rendered homeless and 18,000 of them were evacuated to a total of 106 tent encampments. This is the worst seismic disaster to have occurred in Italy for 29 years.

It would appear that this earthquake is typical of what happens periodically in the central Apennines. Although in recent history damaging earthquakes have been more common in the Region of Umbria, further north, L'Aquila is only 50 km by road from Avezzano, to the southeast, where 29,000 people (comprising almost one quarter of the local population and 97 per cent of that of the city) died in a violent earthquake on 13 January 1915. Moreover, an earthquake in 1984 left 11,000 people homeless in the vicinity of Sulmona, 50 km east of Avezzano.

The event of April 2009 took the form of an earthquake swarm, which is another common feature of central Apennine seismicity. Increasing foreshocks were followed by a main shock of moderate power (although very significant destructive potential) and a poorly attenuated series of aftershocks, some of which almost rivalled the main shock in size. Damage was therefore a result of both a single episode of strong motion and the cumulative effects of multiple shocks on severely weakened buildings.

Damage and casualties

Characteristically, damage appears to be concentrated in unreinforced masonry buildings of a historic nature and poorly constructed modern reinforced concrete buildings. No doubt state of maintenance and the presence of uneven repairs or mixed construction played a role, as is inevitably the case in such events. The most notorious damage appears to have occurred in major ecclesiastical and public buildings and a University of L'Aquila student dormitory.
At the world scale, the overwhelming majority of deaths in earthquakes occur at night, despite the fact that seismic events which cause casualties are evenly distributed among the phases of the day (Alexander 1996). In this case, perhaps the only scenario posing greater risk to life would have been an earthquake that occurred while churches were crowded with worshippers, as was the case in the 1980 Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake (magnitude 6.8, deaths approximately 3,000). In any event aggregate patterns of human behaviour play a large role in determining earthquake death tolls.

As major seismic events have not occurred in living memory in the L'Aquila area, it is unlikely that any of the inhabitants had personal protection plans or other ready resources. Hence there was no culture of individual self-defence against earthquakes, although the Abruzzo Region has a well-earned reputation for its civil protection organisation. Once again the role of self-protective behaviour in earthquakes remains difficult to estimate in terms of its life-saving potential. However, as with all nocturnal events, death tolls must be linked to some extent to the lack of ability to react quickly of people who are sleeping.

Mass media reaction

Initial mass-media coverage of the event followed a pattern that is thoroughly well known to students of disaster journalism. Human interest stories, coverage of VIP visits to the area, news of world reaction to the event, and efforts to convey the flavour of being at the scene of the action intermingled with updates on the statistics of casualties, homelessness and emergency responses. On a positive note, the stoicism and dignity of the survivors came over strongly in the news bulletins and was one factor that contributed to a relative lack of controversy in the reporting of the event.

Time and time again sociologists of disaster have shown that antisocial behaviour is minimised in the aftermath of disaster by the accession of the so-called 'therapeutic community' (Barton 1970). However, it is clear that looting and other spontaneous examples of bad behaviour are dear to the mass media, as they confirm the stylised popular view of disaster as the breakdown of society, as shown in countless Hollywood films. As a result, examples of anti-social behaviour tend to be seized upon and exaggerated. For example, in the 1997 Umbria-Marche earthquake swarm, the last significant seismic disaster that Italy had had to cope with, much was made of looting, but it appears that very few culprits were involved and the incidence of the phenomena was severely circumscribed. In the present case, members of the public purporting to represent the civil protection authorities sent false earthquake warnings by SMS. Others have been accused of price gouging. Much was made of this in the domestic news media, but it is highly likely that once again very few miscreants were involved-a statistically insignificant number of people. The response of the real authorities was firm and decisive.

A further aspect of press reporting shown during this disaster was the common tendency to exaggerate. Both the city of L'Aquila and the small village of Onna, 8 km to the SSE, were described as being 'destroyed'. Aerial views of the buildings of Onna show 100 per cent damage and 50-60 per cent outright collapse. Images of L'Aquila show sporadic damage, including the partial or total collapse of single large buildings and areas in which groups of buildings have battered each other down. In both cases this is far from total devastation. However, aggrandisement is a common feature of disaster reporting in any setting.

Emergency response

Highland Abruzzo is an area of relatively sparse population and the main area of damage appears to be limited to a 25 km radius around the epicentre. Hence, the civil protection response to the emergency posed no exceptional challenges other than the need to conduct rescues in precarious circumstances and to prepare for the eventuality of rainy weather. Five mixed operations centres (Centri Operativi Misti) were soon at work and relief columns were quickly mobilised by the regions of Italy. The ratio of assets to needs posed no unsolvable problems of the allocation of resources. Hence, the disaster represented only a moderate test of the Italian civil protection system, which has undergone very significant transformation and development in recent years, particularly towards decentralisation and the consolidation of organised volunteer forces. As in all seismic events, the L'Aquila earthquake confirmed the role of the National Fire Brigades Corps as the lead agency, owing to its primacy in technical rescue and making urban areas safe.

Despite the competency brought to the field by the relief forces, severe difficulties appear to have been experienced with the seismic inadequacy of buildings chosen to house the operations centres.

The earthquake prediction question

Both in Italy and abroad much attention was given to Dr Giampaolo Giuliani, a technician with connections to the Italian National Research Council, who discovered radon emissions anomalies in the days before the main shock and tried to institute an earthquake warning. Perhaps 10-20 per cent of the initial press coverage of the event was devoted to the ensuing controversy, as the civil protection authorities attempted to quash the warning and continued to state that it had not been justified.

Earthquake prediction can be divided into long-, medium- and short-term phases. In the long and medium terms, the seismicity of the central Apennines is well known, has been thoroughly investigated and has produced good estimates of the recurrence of significant earthquakes. The zone affected in April 2009 remains in the second category, that of moderate seismic risk. Classification is carried out at the level of single municipalities and is revised periodically. It is updated on the basis of data from seismic events, but these are not common enough to give a completely accurate picture. The upgrading of the area's status from one of moderate seismicity is overdue, but in any case many buildings antedate antiseismic norms and have not been retrofitted.

The short-term prediction of earthquakes has considerable allure for scientists, journalists and the public alike. However, it is beset by problems. The main ones can be summarised as follows:-

(a) There is an element of uniqueness in earthquake source mechanisms that tends to defy prediction.

(b) Earthquake source mechanisms are complex and involve many variables and factors.

(c) Radon is an inert element that is present in many rock formations. It may be released in increased quantities into groundwater as a result of the micro-fracturing that precedes an earthquake and generates it source. One might also expect variations in groundwater discharge, as evinced by fluctuating piezometric levels in wells or changes in the discharge of springs. However, world-wide experience with radon monitoring has proved inconclusive.

(d) Although at least eight physical phenomena are capable of showing definable 'signatures' in the hours before earthquakes, no single phenomenon has proved reliable enough to act as a routine predictor. The ratio of P- and S-wave velocities in background seismicity appears to be the most reliable of the phenomena, but even this is not capable of generating routine predictions. Hence, it is wise to consider all precursory phenomena together.

(e) Earthquake precursors are diagnostic of strain in the earth's crustal materials, but not necessarily of the sudden release of that strain.

(f) Even where earthquakes have successfully been forecast in the short term, for example at Haicheng in China in 1975, the prediction has proved difficult to replicate subsequently. In fact the Chinese failed to predict the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which caused the largest toll of casualties of any in the 20th century.

(g) All scientific prediction of earthquakes is probabilistic and probabilities lead to dilemmas about how justified remedial action is. Moreover, most predictions have involved either low probabilities of long time-windows of validity, which makes an emergency response exceedingly difficult (Alexander 2007).

In 1985 the Garfagnana area of the Tuscan Apennines was the scene of a short-term earthquake prediction that was communicated to the population. No earthquake occurred during the days covered by the prediction, or in the subsequent years. However, the public reaction involved significant disruption to normal life, with associated costs and stresses. The exercise was not repeated during the subsequent 24 years.

The Giuliani prediction may or may not have been justified by the available data, but there is little point in issuing a forecast if the warning system is incomplete. Natural hazard warnings should consist of a scientific or technical, an administrative and a social component (see figure). If any of these is lacking or inadequate, the warning process is likely to fail, as it would have done in this case, for no adequate mechanism existed to induce a good preventative reaction on the part of the public of L'Aquila. Hence, as much as any improvement of science, earthquake warning in central Italy would require a cultural change towards personal, family and workplace preparedness and constant sensitivity to the issue, including during protracted periods of seismic quiescence. In short, people would have to have personal disaster preparedness plans. Currently, there are no signs that this will occur and no trends in that direction.

References

Alexander, D.E. 1996. The health effects of earthquakes in the mid-1990s. Disasters 20(3): 231-247.

Alexander, D.E. 2007. Making research on geological hazards relevant to stakeholders' needs. Quaternary International 171/172: 186-192.

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

Society's Resilience in Withstanding Disaster

2009-03-18T15:21:00.000+01:00

Figure 1. Configuration of problems and systems in future disaster risk reduction.

al-wad' ash-shadh (Arabic: a perplexing predicament)

This set of notes is intended as a discussion primer with respect to four questions, which will be considered one by one.

1. In terms of defensive measures, what action should we be taking to reduce vulnerability or prepare responses?

"Court disaster long enough, and it will accept your proposal." (Mason Cooley)

An objective assessment of the relative seriousness of hazards and threats is long overdue. However, because it requires the ability to estimate the impact of future events, the task is not easy. Futurology is at the mercy of changes in society and global trends in economy, strategic stability and international risks.

Vulnerability is the propensity to suffer harm (damage, casualties, loss of income or revenue, loss of function, and so on). In essence it is a holistic phenomenon, but for the purposes of analysis it can be broken down into components: physical, social, economic, cultural, etc. In analogy to the way in which friction is an inherent phenomenon that materialises when it is mobilised by the application of a force, so vulnerability is inherent and responds to the appearance of a hazard. The larger the hazard, the greater is the vulnerability.

Resilience is a concept that is derived by analogy from rheology, the science of materials behaviour. It signifies the ability of society to absorb and resist the shocks and pressures caused by disaster or crisis. Resilience may be an inherent property or it can be created.

Is resilience the opposite, or reciprocal, of vulnerability? Does any initiative that increases resilience automatically reduce vulnerability, or are the linkages more sophisticated?

What is the greatest threat that we face? (and who exactly are 'we'?). In terms of the world economic system, the leading candidates are as follows:-

* A global pandemic of H5N1 influenza (not spread by birds), composed of repeated, virulent waves of infection to which vaccines will be made available too late to help the majority of the people at risk. The main effects of the pandemic would probably be felt over a two-year period. The impact on healthcare, communications, travel, commerce, entertainment, tourism, and basic services would be profound in the extreme.

* A major radioactive contamination of a highly populated area, especially if the locality is also a node of international importance for communications, commerce and travel. Nuclear terrorism, the use of a nuclear bomb, or meltdown of a reactor with radiation plume release are all potential sources of hazard.

* Coordinated, terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure using an innovative strategy (whatever it may be) and leading to severe curtailment of world economic activity as a result of the combined effects of damage, precautionary (and hence restrictive) measures and public anxiety (leading to lack of investment).

* A major volcanic eruption at least as great as that of Tambora, 1815, or Krakatau, 1883 (in Indonesia), the two worst eruptions of historical times. Climatic effects could be severe over a four-year period, with major impacts on the production of food. A modern instance of something like the Krakatau eruption would produce water wave and shockwave effects that would be far worse than those of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

* A major earthquake could generate significant effects. The greatest risks are found in Tehran, Istanbul and Tokyo. Scenarios for the last of these predict $3,000 billion in losses and domino effects on world capital markets.

* Rather less likely to create change is a 'superstorm' that travels across one of the main concentrations of population and commercial activities, devastating it.

Taken together, these hazards are about equally divided between civil defence and civil protection concerns. The difference lies in the means of organisation and participation. Civil defence is usually a 'top-down' system co-ordinated nationally; civil protection may be harmonised from above, but is a locally-based, 'bottom-up' system (Alexander 2002). The former is appropriate to counter-terrorism activities and the latter to most other forms of incident or disaster. It is essential to maintain the right balance, despite the difficulty of determining which event or events will be dominant in the future. It should be noted that, no matter how large the area affected, all disasters are local events, because the local area is inevitably the theatre of relief operations.

In Europe, excessive concentration on counter-terrorism activities could leave the continent open to a fiasco similar to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the United States in 2005, in which the structures, organisation and resources were poorly adapted to cope with the impact of a major natural disaster.

In summary, we may ask whether measures designed to reduce vulnerability automatically create resilience, and do measures designed to create resilience automatically reduce vulnerability? Furthermore, what should the relationship be between civil defence and civil protection systems: which should predominate and under what circumstances? And what sort of event is likely to catalyse radical change?

2. To what extent should risk-avoidance take precedence over normal life?

"A reasonable man adopts himself to the world.
An unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt
the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends
upon the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)

Modern western societies are becoming increasingly intolerant of risk, yet risk aversion is expensive, inefficient and usually irrational. Already, there are many cases in which risk avoidance (or risk minimisation) is normal life, whether it be a deliberate choice or something that is imposed by rules and regulations. Hence, the provision of security accounted for 7-8 per cent of the cost of running airports ten years ago but the figure has now risen to 36-38 per cent.

The increasing complexity of western society has led to a form of abnegation of responsibility for personal risk management. Whereas 60 years ago people were accustomed to fending for themselves, they now depend on networks of organisations and services to a greater extent than ever before. Disaster thus becomes a form of 'betrayal by the authorities' (Horlick-Jones 1995), who failed to provide the necessary security or safety.

The development of the global market economy has exported risk to places that are ill-equipped to reduce it. In a certain light, international terrorism can be seen as an attempt to repatriate risk to some of the places it came from (cf. Wisner 2003).

Culture is an elusive phenomenon that is difficult to analyse and characterise but is nevertheless a fundamental ingredient of emergency preparedness and disaster risk reduction. Work with culture and it will facilitate operations; work against it and it will block initiatives. Culture can be changed, but the process tends to be slow, laborious, expensive and inefficient. Nonetheless, it is essential. The challenge of the 21st century is to create a culture in which people will take more responsibility for their own safety and risk management. The process is becoming too complex and substantial to be left entirely to the experts.

In synthesis, human life has always adapted itself to risk and there is no reason why it should cease to do so now. Indeed, greater adaptation to risk could be considered to be a means of ensuring greater contact with normality despite the forms of social isolation created by modern technology. The fundamental question concerns what form the adaptation should take. It must blend judicious use of welfare with 'informed consent' on personal and public assumption of risks.

The risk agenda needs to be reorientated towards a more objective assessment of the relative importance of different hazards and threats, one that is not dependent on the priorities of particular factions, parties and interest groups.

3. Should we reconsider the value of sophisticated technology?

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology
has exceeded our humanity." (Albert Einstein)

"The first rule of any technology used in a business
is that automation applied to an efficient operation
will magnify the efficiency. The second is that
automation applied to an inefficient operation will
magnify the inefficiency." (Bill Gates)

"The system of nature, of which man is a part,
tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing.
Not so with technology." (E.F. Schumacher)

In brief, the problems with technology in relation to disasters are as follows. First, disasters and emergencies are essentially social problems and they require solutions that are derived socially. Secondly, no technology is infallible and hence its malfunctioning could become the source of disaster in its own right. Hence, cultural values that see technology as the ultimate solution to problems are capable of creating vulnerability. Finally, technology can too easily be an end rather than a means. The benefits of technological projects designed to reduce disaster need to be assessed critically and with detachment, especially as they increasingly tend to be expensive and to consume many resources. The use of technology in a disaster area should be determined by the salience of problems that need solutions, and not vice versa.

In synthesis, more effort should be made to quell the tendency to seek technological solutions for social problems. Distinct dangers are associated with the application of ever more sophisticated technology in complex situations of disaster and risk, for complexity can be self-multiplying. Augustus Caesar (63 BC--AD 14) said that the more complex a problem is, the simpler should be the solution.

Current plans for the development of technology should only be approved if their social implications and benefits are clear, and their potential complicating effects and vulnerabilities are known and can be dealt with.

4. Is greater international cooperation needed?

"...cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today,
begins where competition leaves off." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

The great geographical variety of political systems, administrative structures, cultures and hazards rules out the creation of a single emergency preparedness system at either the world or the continental scale. However, this should not inhibit international co-operation.

Nevertheless, international standards, treaties and protocols tend to be weighed down by the solid mass of consensus that nations struggle to achieve when creating such instruments. Behind the negotiations there is a reluctance to commit resources to dealing with events that are considered hypothetical, or at least not within the purview of current legislative terms.

The international relief system is highly inefficient. Resources are sent around the world to major disaster areas and many of them arrive too late or are inappropriate. Despite decades of fine-tuning of the system, this is still true, especially concerning international search-and-rescue.

Despite decades of wisdom about shifting the balance from reacting to disasters to preparing for and preventing them, the lion's share of the resources are still committed to the clean-up, not to prior preparation. Moreover, the level of preparedness varies considerably from place to place. In the end, these are problems that can only be solved by greater international collaboration, but what form should it take?

The solutions should start from the proposition that there is no inherent reason why rich countries should have one system of disaster risk reduction and poor countries another. Organisation is not necessarily an expensive commodity and information is decreasing in price. Information technology can be relatively cheap and has proved to be versatile, portable and adaptable to diverse environments and cultures.

Co-operation needs to change its focus, or at least its emphasis, from reacting to events to new ways of implanting organisation and technology in new environments. We know very well where the world's future disaster areas are going to be. These are the places where the international community must foster innovation and cultural change--with all due local sensitivity--in terms of the adaptation of proven universal methods of disaster risk reduction to existing local capacities.

Major international programmes are needed for the transfer of knowledge, organisation and technology to the local level in places that lack capacity.

Conclusion

"I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages." (Bill Mauldin)

"Ah, my boy, if you spot a crowd coming down
the road, go the other way and see if they've
dropped anything." (Eric L. Jones)

I believe that sooner or later a major event will lead to a global change in attitudes towards disaster risk reduction. The first section of these notes contains some speculation about what sort of event it could be, although the picture is anything but clear. In the early 21st century capital has subsumed labour and recent history offers little indication that high death tolls could be the distinguishing feature of such an event (Alexander 2000, Ch. 2). Instead, the event that induces change would have to upset the world financial system to the extent that radical solutions become the only way of protecting it. At present, disasters represent accelerated forms of consumption of goods (Jones 2003). They are thus situations of profit and loss. A catalytic disaster would have to tip the balance so decisively in favour of loss that radical action would become essential. It is not clear which sort of event will be first to achieve that change, nor which will be the primary system by which it is confronted (Figure 1).

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing, Harpenden, U.K., and Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

Alexander, D. 2002. From civil defence to civil protection--and back again. Disaster Prevention and Management 11(3): 209-213.

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

Jones, E.L. 2003. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (3rd edn). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Quarantelli, E.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.

Wisner, B. 2003. Changes in capitalism and global shifts in the distribution of hazard and vulnerability. In M. Pelling (ed.) Natural Disasters and Development in a Globalizing World. Routledge, London: 43-56.