Talk no. 4: Disasters, Resilience and the Tension of Opposites

Four Talks on Disaster Risk Reduction, no. 4

Disasters, Resilience and the Tension of Opposites

The word resilience, or resiliency, has a 500-year history in the English language. It stems from the Latin verb resilire, 'to recoil' or rebound. The first scientific use of the term occurred in the Edwardian era slightly more than a century ago, when it was applied in mechanics. A resilient material is one that, under an applied force, reacts with an optimum combination of strength and ductility. The strength enables it to resist the force and the ductility to deform in order to absorb some of the stress that is applied.

In the 1960s resiliency was first used to describe ecological systems that could resist shocks to their equilibrium. The term was applied in the sense of formal systems analysis. Twenty-five years later the concept came into common use in psychology, with particular reference to the ability of children to survive the trauma of conflict, disaster or family strife.

Resiliency became fashionable in disaster risk reduction only in the mid-2000s. By analogy with mechanics, a resilient society is one that is strong enough to resist the shock effect of disaster and flexible enough to adapt to those aspects that cannot be repulsed. The idea draws upon both the long tradition of building structural protection against natural disasters (dams, levees, anti-seismic housing, and so on) and 90 years of human ecological studies on how people and societies adapt to hazards.

One common misassumption about resiliency is that it simply means 'to bounce back', in the sense of recreating the conditions that prevailed before disaster struck. A much better idea is to "build back better", in which disaster becomes the opportunity to improve conditions beyond what they were before. In many parts of the world this is an imperative, and one hopes that disaster is not a brake on development, but the opportunity to further it by introducing more functional plans, better initiatives for renewal and an augmented culture of safety. One also hopes that this is is the case, not only in terms of physical protection, but also with respect to social and institutional development.

Gradually, the erosion of boundaries between disciplines and professions has led to a consensus that the answers to the problems posed by disasters need to be holistic. The sectoral approach has often created more problems than it has solved, for example, by encouraging development behind structural barriers that fail to offer adequate protection against floods, landslides, avalanches or tsunamis—in fact no structural measures ever offer 100 per cent protection. Indeed, without a holistic approach that develops measures in a variety of structural and non-structural domains, there may be a risk transfer effect, but not of the mutually beneficial kind. More likely it will transfer risk from where it is tractable to where it is intractable or cannot so easily be sustained.

Indeed, one of the most common forms of risk transfer involves the marginalisation of the poor and dispossessed. All evidence points to the fact that disasters tend to strengthen pre-existing power structures. Once the 'therapeutic community' of welfare and mutual assistance has evaporated, the social milieu that emerges tends to be a version of what was there before that exaggerates its own defects. For instance, after the December 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua, the rich and middle classes rebuilt their damaged property in six months: some of the poor and marginalised people of the city never rebuilt their homes at all. Hence, disasters are seldom about empowerment, even though they ought to be. They weaken the weak and strengthen the hand of the strong. In the Caribbean, for example, Hurricane Mitch set back development in some areas by twenty years, and it left plantation workers destitute as their employers switched production elsewhere and offered them no safety net. What was mere inconvenience to a multinational company was devastating to its employees.

It should be apparent from this discussion, and from much of what one reads about disaster, that it is a thing of light and shade. Indeed, the tension of opposites, the chiaroscuro of disaster, dominates the whole field. This is hardly a new predicament. In fact, perhaps without being aware of it, we still use the ancient Platonic notions of generatio and corruptio, creation and destruction. The Greeks had intended them primarily as expressions of small-scale cycles, by which, for example, mountains were elevated and their rocks gradually shattered and scoured away by erosion. Indeed, they saw the world as continuously locked in the dialectic of creation and destruction. The Mediæval thinker, on the other hand, was apt to impose a beginning and an end to the great cycles, and hence generatio gradually became equated with Genesis, and corruptio with the Day of Judgement and the ensuing extinction of the world in a final conflagration. Greeks who had been sceptical of Plato had interpreted his magnus annus (or Great Year) in this way, as one phase of growth and decay encompassing all life and human existence.

Despite our different perspective in the 21st century, that tension of opposites, generatio and corruptio, remains a part of our outlook.

In fact, sometimes the ancient Greek thinkers seem quintessentially modern. Consider, for example, Anaximander of Miletus, whose dates were  615 to 547 BCE. By a process of dispassionate observation of the world around him he raised the great questions: what is nature? What is the source of the confusion and change that we see around us, and how are we to reconcile it with the concept of eternal and absolute order? Almost 2,600 years later, if we knew the answers to these questions sufficiently well, we would probably know enough to bring the disasters problem fully under control.

Instead, we live in the New Baroque Era. True, history does not repeat itself, but it does make some close passes with respect to how it once was. The old Baroque period was distinguished by the tension of opposites. In Europe, the Ancien Régime began to crumble under the duress of technological and social change. Old certainties began to disappear. The 21st century has its absolutism, its barbarism and its perplexities, too. In both periods we can discern a struggle to come to terms with the rapidly shifting foundations of society.

I was much struck by the parallels between the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 and the attacks on the United States in September 2001. In both cases, the heart of a great trading empire was suddenly, unexpectedly struck a cataclysmic, death-dealing blow on a calm, sunny morning. Even the visual parallels are striking: lofty buildings, with their repetitive fenestration, suddenly brought down, towers decapitated, dust plumes and crackling fires that consumed the wreckage. I have written in detail about the philosophical, social and symbolic similarities between the two disasters (see Disasters journal, 2002). Suffice it to say that in each case the shockwaves rippled out across society and led to consequences far beyond their points of origin—in time, in geography and in form of socio-economic mutation.

The Lisbon earthquake is widely held to have ushered in a darker period of history, in which the optimism of the Enlightenment was replaced by a black pessimism about the human condition and the future of society. Most probably, one cannot generalise so readily, such are the many points of view that need to be taken into account. However, continuing the parallel with modern times, it is true that there was a resurgence of militarism after the 2001 disasters, and one that could be directly connected to them. The attitude after Lisbon, when the human experience was suddenly revealed to be malevolent, was perhaps yet more authoritarian.

This brings be on to one of my favourite topics: the difference between civil defence and civil protection. The terms are often employed loosely. For example, the civil protection service of New Zealand is the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management. However, I believe it is useful and necessary to distinguish between the two forms of organisation. Civil defence, in its purest form, is a centralised, national, top-down service that is designed to protect a country against armed aggression. Originally, this was by other states, but latterly it has been practised by loosely organised ideological groups, possibly with state backing (one should not underestimate the importance in the modern era of proxy wars, however "asymmetric" they may be). Civil protection, sensu stricto, is a bottom-up, locally organised, federated system designed to protect the civilian population against natural and technological disasters. Some countries, for example Italy, have both systems clearly delineated, and in such cases they tend to complement, rather than conflict, with one another.

In organising a country or region to fight disasters (both in terms of crisis response and risk reduction), there is usually a gradual transition from military to civilian models. Information and communications technology is widely employed nowadays, and one of its effects is to flatten the chain of command. It is clear, moreover, that civil protection works best when it is allied with participatory governance.

Now according to the dictionary, 'governance' is nothing more than "the act of governing". However, for the term to mean anything in the context of disaster risk reduction, it must signify a common social process: representative democracy, but probably also a substantial dose of participatory democracy. One reason is that we need to induce people to assume more of their own risks (allowing for welfare, which I will discuss shortly), and another is that what is done to protect society needs to be based on approval by consensus.

From the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the San Francisco tremors and urban fire of 1906, citizens were summarily executed if they did not do what the authorities thought they should do. Authoritarianism in disaster aftermaths has not disappeared: indeed, leaders with strong personalities see it as an easy fix to complex problems—giving people a dose of what they need, whether or not they want it. However, in the last twenty or thirty years there has been much more discussion of ethics and equity than before, and the spotlight of instant publicity has fostered this trend.

At this point I think I might open a parenthesis by asking which was the first "modern" disaster? There are, of course, varying interpretations of this, and I can only offer the one that I favour. It was the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, sometimes known as the Biafra war. A quite artificial famine was induced in the Nigerian state of Biafra as part of a 'scorched earth' policy against the rebels. This was the first time that television cameras reached the area during the crisis phase, filmed the human suffering in the raw and, with some ingenuity, played the footage on television news within a matter of hours. It was not real-time broadcasting, but it was a breakthrough that led inexorably to exactly that.

I might add that civil defence, in its modern form, probably began one morning in April 1937 at the Battle of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was the first concerted aerial bombardment in history. It may well have been the tipping point at which warfare started to reap a greater toll among civilians (particularly women and children) than among soldiers, which it now routinely does. The rudimentary attempts to protect the civilian population on the ground were to grow to fully-fledged systems of civil defence a few years later during the Second World War.

Origins apart, civil defence was the progenitor of civil protection. Hence it is tempting, and perhaps legitimate, to think in terms of an evolutionary process from one to the other. Is civil defence, perhaps, the darker reality and civil protection a more optimistic one in terms of the human condition? Is such an interpretation justified in terms of social, organisational and institutional evolution? Does evolution of any kind naturally bring us to a happier, more adjusted state? In this case, perhaps: civil defence is, after all, linked to warfare and conflict, while the raw material—more properly the core material—of civil protection tends to be a more morally neutral set of phenomena associated with natural disasters and unanticipated failures of technology. It is also the defence of civic values against any enemy, whether morally neutral or not.

"Man's inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!" wrote Robert Burns in 1785. In that sense, it was inevitable that civil defence would never go away. Indeed, it could be regarded as the ethical face of warfare. Or could it?

The civil defence of the 1940s was an affair of tin hats and gas masks in canvas bags. Its operatives pulled survivors from the rubble of bomb-sites and found them makeshift accommodation. As the War was ending, the term 'iron curtain' was already being used to describe a situation that would vastly intensify once the threat of all-out nuclear conflict was fully appreciated. Civil defence in the post-War period was dominated by a series of preparations that were increasingly and demonstrably futile. If populations could survive nuclear war, what sort of world would they emerge into? Would there be a food chain at all? Would radioactive contamination wipe them out, person by person? Would the state have protected its people or only its élite? Would it have used civil defence to protect the élite against the people? We will never know, but there will always be doubts about the motives inherent in civil defence during the Cold War. In most countries it was a very secretive affair, and secrecy does not breed trust.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the most symbolic moments in modern history. It led to a lapse in civil defence that, however, was anything but permanent. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the so-called "peace dividend", the economic "beating of swords into ploughshares", lasted only until about 1994. Terrorism has conveniently provided a new Cold War. In part this is justified by the mutation of proxy wars (as practised previously in Afghanistan and Africa, for instance) into proxy-based asymmetric conflict (as practised, once again, in Afghanistan, and also the Middle East and Asia, and periodically imported into the West). For the rest it represents the resurgence and reassertion of the cold warriors after their brief period in the wilderness.

Clausewitz regarded war as "politics carried on by other means". I would prefer to see it as economics, rather than politics, "carried on by other means". Its fuel is the military-industrial complex (and in this respect it is notable that the global armaments industry has not suffered from the recession that has so deeply affected virtually every other sector of production). Let me correct myself: it is a military-industrial-academic complex, because many people in the universities are seduced by the opportunity to give it an intellectual justification. They are the retailers of fear and anguish.

So was civil defence reborn. Its first act was to suck up money in copious quantities. The links between civil defence and civil protection vary from one country to another, but, however they are configured, they are always joined at the hip by the question of funding. Their interconnection brings me to another of my pet interests: the relationship between centrism and devolution.

Civil defence is necessarily based on the nation state. If time and space permitted, I would launch a diatribe about that and the question of national identity (let me declare my interest: I am a federalist and anti-nationalist). Rather than being the natural state of human beings, nations are a relatively recent construct that in less than half a millennium has contrived a temporary solution to the questions of identity and citizenship. But the defence of the realm requires a national approach, because in most countries that is where in the hierarchy the armed forces, intelligence services and command structures are located.

In contrast, wherever it is, civil protection needs local input. Failure to organise locally, failure to support local solutions to local problems, and failure to take local interests into account will result in the failure of civil protection. Evidently, it needs to be harmonised at successively higher levels of government, or otherwise there will not be enough interoperability. And civil protection forces are moving ever further around the world's chess-board of disaster responses. In this respect one of the recent trends has been to fuse international with domestic disaster response in the interests of greater efficiency (but it needs a radical overhaul of attitudes and training).

I have been a regional government employee in two countries and have observed the local response to threats, risks and hazards as it occurs and in a variety of settings. I am convinced that it flourishes the most when it is given autonomy (but perhaps also guidance and support). Herein lies the dilemma for most national governments. Devolving power is a vote-getter, but after it has been devolved, governments tend to regret their actions and want it back. This is especially true if the intermediate and local levels of public administration turn out to be pugnaciously independent.

If civil protection is very poorly developed in a given place, once disaster strikes it will be swept aside as aid, assistance and command lines are imported into the area. Once these are withdrawn, as if they were the Roman legions marching back to defend the centre of a collapsing empire, then the local response is doomed to be the victim of its own ineffectiveness.

Local (and indeed regional and national) administrators vary in their attitudes to disaster reduction and response. This field suffers considerably from the "no votes in sewage" syndrome. In other words, come what may, it has a negative profile. Even the concepts of more safety and security don't seem to be sufficiently positive to enthuse politicians in search of re-election (or not unless there has very recently been a bad disaster in their precincts). Moreover, politicians can avail themselves of the Great Gamble: that disaster will not strike during their next term of office. As a result of the public's lack of understanding of probabilities and the need to prepare for the worse in "times of peace", they usually get away with it. If a disaster does occur, many of them are adept at blaming the failure to prepare on someone else.

Few nations can aspire to the levels of rigour and honesty that prevail in Sweden. Having discovered, amid great national scandal, that it did not have the capacity to manage the Swedish aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it set up a national agency for civil protection. Due to lack of experience with this form of organisation, it did not work well. The Swedes learnt fast—very fast indeed—and within months had it reorganised and functioning well at all levels from Stockholm to the provincial towns. No doubt Swedes who read this will, through familiarity with defects to the system, pick holes in my description, but compared to other countries I can assure them that they are making a counsel of perfection. And the science and art of civil protection are both highly imprecise.

Now there are countries, like France, where the administrative traditions are highly centralised and are likely to remain so. They will have to find their own solutions to the problem of local autonomy in the face of disasters. Let me remind them that the opposite of such autonomy is, if I may borrow a bastard term, assistentialism. By ironic reference to existentialism, this is dependence on imported assistance. Once the source of that help dries up, nothing is left but a dependence on something that is not there. It tends to kill local initiative.

To watch other countries deal with the problem of managing disasters and associated risks is to chart the progress of a constant, often very dynamic, tension between centrism and devolution. The latter solves problems, but it does so by engendering the fear that things will get out of hand.

A subsidiary issue connected with this tension between centrism and devolution is that of the dual roles of imported and indigenous knowledge. Throughout this discussion, I use the term 'imported' to mean "brought into the area in question", but not necessarily across an international border. Imported technologies, know-how and procedures are often vilified for their effect in depleting local autonomy and making local communities dependent on extraneous ways of doing things that, perhaps, they don't fully understand. This is often very true, most sadly, but it would be wrong to glorify all indigenous knowledge, some of which is positively toxic. For example, after the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake it was reported that Inuit fishermen had a tradition which informed them that tsunamis are composed of two waves. Many were drowned by the third wave, which was the largest in the 1964 sequence. But now back to the primary distinction.

Theoretically, both civil defence and civil protection are potential hand-maidens of revolution, or at least of insurrection. In fact, in the politically polarised times of the Cold War, with all their associated fears and suspicions, in places, civil protection was actively prevented from developing, in case it led to a coup d'êtat. This, of course, was when civil protection was seen as a sub-military parallel to the armed forces.

Although few generals, majors and colonels will admit it, military commanders often feel out of their depth when dealing with disasters. Such events are a shadowy, ambiguous form of enemy and many of the tactics used to deal with unruly citizens can only be practised on the very people the armed forces are seeking to protect. Hence the gradual 'civilianisation' of civil defence and its transition into civil protection. When the leaders of the latter are no longer military men but are trained women, we will have arrived. Many women have shown extraordinary aptitude as disaster managers, although it is not yet clear whether this is because they are naturally superior at the job to men or merely because to make progress they are forced to compete in a male-dominated world. I suspect the former.

So the tension of opposites between civil defence and civil protection is likely to continue. Civil protection does not do some of the things that civil defence does, notably forensic analysis, surveillance and intelligence gathering. But civil defence tends to be inept at managing natural disasters on the local level. The military-industrial academic complex would have us believe that the threats from extreme natural events are relatively stable, while those from terrorism and unrest are growing dynamically. In reality it could be the other way around, especially given the potential effects of climate change. True, the momentous adaptations that a dynamic climate will require of human populations will probably foment unrest, but is the solution civil defence, or is it greater equity in the distribution of resources? And greater emphasis on the stewardship of the resources we have?

One issue that arises out of all of this is welfare. Strictly conceived, this is the provision of assistance necessary for adequately decent living conditions to people who cannot provide such a thing for themselves. Unfortunately, welfare has tended to mutate into largesse, and this often has a political motivation behind it. The effect of this has been to cheapen the concept and render it both unworkable and unacceptable to society. Yet welfare will always be needed, unless one subscribes to such a Darwinian view that one believes that social misfits and losers in the great lottery of life should be callously abandoned to their fate.

Hence, welfare needs constantly to be redefined and reinvented. It should go hand in hand with the sort of empowerment (big governance rather than big government) that enables some people to avoid it. And we need to avoid attitudes to welfare that resemble those of the Victorian moralists: properly conceived, it is neither a social disease nor an intolerable burden on society.

Although it is not a tension of opposites, resilience and sustainability need to be considered together. The one is the other. Hence, the sustainability of disaster risk reduction is the sustainability of lifestyles and livelihoods, and of the Earth's carrying capacity. No technofix can ensure that, so the problem is social and cultural, even emotional, as much as it is one of applying more and more technology.

We have moved away from the idea of the New Baroque Era and the tension of opposites. There are many of these and I encourage those who have patiently followed this discussion to seek and identify them. Is resilience the opposite of vulnerability, and is the change in emphasis a useful switch from a negative to a more positive view of disaster? Can we better solve the problem by adopting a "can-do" approach, or must we first develop a better understanding of the sum total of human suffering and misery.

To end these talks, I pose the question, what comes after resilience? Like everyone else I don't know, and I have no crystal ball that reveals the future to me. Like all committed scientists and citizens, I have tried to follow the trends, and reflect on where they are taking us. So I leave you with a possible clue: perhaps the tension is between fragility and hardening. And I leave you to work out what that might mean for disaster risk reduction. Thank you for your attention.

Disaster Risk Reduction: What Really Matters

The more I participate in events and initiatives, the more I look at current trends in disaster risk reduction (DRR), the more I am put off by the lack of forward-looking attitudes. I see two dominant problems.

First, as I write, it is 2013, the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the "radical critique" by Kenneth Hewitt et al. (Hewitt 1983). In a nutshell, this showed, convincingly and with examples derived from four years of contemporary research, that vulnerability is the real driver of disaster risk, and hazard is often merely the trigger. The primacy of vulnerability is ensured by feedback loops. Rather than returning to the preceding model, we should be seeking to develop Hewitt's thesis into something yet more attuned to the problems of the world thirty years later.

In the thirty years that have elapsed since then, we have seen modest growth in studies of vulnerability and exposure and massive growth in hazards studies, thus ensuring the primacy of the pre-1983 view of disaster. The very reason for the publication of Hewitt's critique was to show that an approach based on hazards does not produce disaster risk reduction to any satisfactory degree.

Secondly, I notice an increasing discrepancy between the tone of the meetings about DRR that I attend and what I read in my newspaper. This amounts to a failure to face up to the reality of the modern world. Of course, there are encouraging signs of progress, worthwhile initiatives and good practices. However, there are also bad signs. For example, little has been done to restrict the gradual migration of wealth from the poor and needy to the rich and powerful. To cite a specific example of the 'dark side', a news report (Guardian, 14 February 2013) noted that billionaires are lavishly funding the work of those who seek to undermine the consensus on climate change and its causes. Hence, not all billionaires are philanthropists in the mould of Carnegie, Rockefeller or Gates.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the prospects for disaster risk reduction are heavily influenced by hegemony, undemocratic influence, organised crime, proxy conflicts, resource wars, corruption, rigged economic prospects and denial of human rights (Alexander and Davis 2013). Most of the debates rely on the 'fiction of good intentions'. We aim to provide decision-makers, public administrators and captains of industry with the tools that they need to understand and manage risk and disaster. But will they use them. Indeed, do they care? Or alternatively what do they care about?

The term 'governance' should interpreted to mean a form of transparent, flexible, fair, morally defensible, democratic participation in decision making. It is increasingly regarded as a prerequisite of DRR and a determinant of the level of resilience (Djalanti et al. 2011). What is clear, and so often ignored, is that merely presenting the case for governance does not make in spring into being. In the same way, merely offering the tools to abate hazards does not mean that vulnerability will dwindle away and disaster risk will abate. The only solution is to see the world as it really is—warts and all—and militantly insist on progress.

Instead, one could be forgiven for believing that we live in an age of the 'dialogue of the deaf'—the age of heedlessness.

References

Alexander, D.E. and I. Davis 2012. Disaster risk reduction: an alternative viewpoint. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 2: 1-5.

Djalante, R., C. Holley and F. Thomalla 2011. Adaptive governance and managing resilience to natural hazards. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 2(4): 1-14.

Guardian 2013. Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial think-tanks. The Guardian, 14 February 2013.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/14/funding-climate-change-denial-thinktanks-network?INTCMP=SRCH

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

The Bouncy Castle of North London and the Origins of Resilience

Bacon on Resilience, 1625

To state that the term 'resilience' was invented in a bouncy castle in North London is about as accurate as writing that Richard III died after being knifed in the buttocks in a car park in Leicester. However, there is more to the story than mere embroidery of the facts.

Canonbury Tower was constructed in the early 16th century on the site of Roman remains. The builder was William Bolton, Prior of St Bartholomew, the forerunner of the eponymous hospital. In 1537, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the tower passed to Thomas Cromwell, First Earl of Essex (1485-1540). As State property, for the period 1616-26 it became the residence of Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (Glinert 2012, p. 359). Bacon is credited with devising the modern scientific method, or at least the inductive version of it. He was also responsible for the first known use of the term 'resilience'.

Many students of the robustness of things, systems and people believe that 'resilience' was coined by C.S. Holling in his landmark 1967 paper on systems ecology (Holling, 1967). For example, Berkes (2007, p. 286) wrote, "Originally developed as an ecological concept, resilience is being applied to coupled human-environment systems." Goldstein and Brooks (2006, p. 3) were a little more generous with time when they stated that "The study of resilience traces its roots back a scant 50 years." In reality, the word has a very much longer history (OED 2013). It stems from resilire, resilio, Latin for 'bounce'—hence the idea of 'bouncing back'.

The etymology of resilire is unknown, which indicates that it was probably a part of standard Latin—as much as any such thing existed—in Classical times. The term appears in the writings of Seneca, Pliny the Younger, Ovid and Livy. Much later, it passed into Middle French (resiler) and then across the Channel into English as the verb resile, a word that appears in the State Papers of King Henry VIII in 1529 and evidently relates to his troubles with his first queen, Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536). Here, it was used in the sense of 'retract', or 'return to a former position'.

In the late sixteenth century, the term seemed to have enjoyed greater use by the Scottish intelligentsia than by its English counterpart, and it was intimately interwoven into the Scots dialect. Although resile faded from use in the 1700s, since then it has been periodically revived in writings by those authors who like to employ anachronisms.

Bacon was unusual for his time in that he wrote in both Latin and in English, the latter for a greater divulgation of his work. Hence, there was bound to be some transfer of terminology between the two languages. In 1625 he published a compendium of writings on natural history, the Sylva Sylvarum. In this, during a musing on the strength of echoes, he used the term resilience (Bacon 1625, p. 245—see figure, above).

The first known dictionary definition of resilience comes from the Glossographia compiled by the lawyer and antiquarian Thomas Blount (1618-79). It is interesting that Blount chose the word resilience to be among the 11,000 that he felt were far enough from common parlance to merit defining. He attributed it a dual meaning: to rebound and to go back on one's word (as in resilement, an obsolete derivative). Blount's lexicon went through several editions and was imitated by eighteenth century authors (whose works also included the term resilience), but the Glossographia faded into obscurity with the publication of more authoritative compendia.

It is interesting to note that the appearance of the word 'resiliency' post-dates 'resilience' by several years. Apparently, the former was first employed in 1651 in the English translation of Lumen divinum reformatae synopsis ("Natural Philosophy Reformed by Divine Light"), which was written by the Moravian theologian John Amos Comenius (1592-1670). This work was originally published (in Latin) in Leipzig in 1633 as part of Comenius's Didactica magna omnibus. At the time, Comenius was busy making Swedish schools resilient.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, resilience was still used in the sense of rebounding. Samuel Taylor Coleridge employed it thus in Hymn to Earth in Friendship's Offering, a rather mediocre poetic offering dated 1834:-

Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy center!
Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience: and forthwith
Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement.
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts, [...]

At this time the two nouns, and the verb, were used in various ways to denote rebounding, elasticity and fickleness. The last of these is, of course, a negative connotation, and one that was employed from Samuel Johnson in 1751 to Henry Best in 1826). Portentiously, from 1839 the term was also used to signify the ability to recover from adversity.

The first serious use of the term resilience in mechanics occurred around 1858, when the eminent Scottish engineer William J.M. Rankine (1820-72) employed it to describe the strength and ductility of steel beams. In an applied context, it was used in 1867 to describe the robustness of the cladding of the prototype iron ships. Herein lies the origin of the modern use of the term in civil protection. A resilient steel beam survives the application of a force by resisting it with strength (rigidity) and absorbing it with deformation (ductility). By analogy, the strength of a human society under stress is its ability to devise means of resisting disaster and maintaining its integrity (coherence), while the ductility lies in its ability to adapt to circumstances produced by the calamity (Alexander 2012).

Resilience and resiliency are synonyms. They have been widely applied in mechanics, particularly to the resistance properties of steel, yarn and woven fabrics (Hoffmann 1948). The adoption of the concept by Holling was specifically related to a systems theory approach to analysis of the stability of ecological assemblages (Von Bertalanffy 1950). This derivation does not work well when it is transposed to situations in which the general systems characteristics are less formally defined.

In the 1950s, the term resilience started to be used in psychology and it finally became popular in this field in the late 1980s (Flach 1988). It has been used particularly in relation to the psychiatric problems of children (Goldstein and Brooks 2006).

Independently of developments in psychology,  at the end of the 1990s resilience made the transition from natural ecology to human ecology (i.e. social sciences) thanks to the work of economists (e.g. Batabyal 1998) and geographers (e.g. Adger 2000). One legacy of ecology is an enduring emphasis on system stability as a hallmark of resilience. Perhaps questioning that ought to be a goal of future theoretical work.

Lastly, if 'resilience' was indeed first coined in Bacon's study in Canonbury Tower, there could not have been a more appropriate place for that to happen. Apparently, Bolton had the tower built because he was much troubled by the predictions of astrologers that there would be a return of the Universal Deluge. Hence, he had it stocked with two month's supply of food—very resilient!

References

Adger, W. N. 2000. Social and ecological resilience; are they related? Progress in Human Geography 24(3): 347-364.

Alexander, D.E. 2012. Resilience against earthquakes: some practical suggestions for planners and managers.  Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering 13(2): 109-115.

Bacon, Francis 1625. Sylva Sylvarum, or of Natural History in ten Centuries. W. Lee, London.

Batabyal, A.A. 1998. The concept of resilience: retrospect and prospect. Environment and Development Economics 3(2): 235-239.

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

Blount, T. 1656. Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue. The Newcomb, London.

Comenius, John Amos 1651. Natural Philosophy Reformed by Divine Light: Or lumen divinuem reformatate synopsis (Leipzig, 1633), London 1651.

Flach, F.F. 1988. Resilience: Discovering a New Strength in Times of Stress. Fawcett Books, New York, 264 pp.

Glinert, E. 2012. The London Compendium. Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 523 pp.

Goldstein, S. and R.B. Brooks 2006. Handbook of Resilience in Children. Springer, New York, 416 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.

OED 2013. Oxford English Dictionary on line: www.oed.com (accessed 6 February 2013).

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

The tragic absurdity of nightclub fires

On 20 February 2003 fire broke out at The Station Nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, USA. One hundred people died in the crowded locale, 230 were injured and 132 escaped unscathed. The salient characteristics of this event were as follows:-

• pyrotechnics were used as part of the act that patrons were watching
• the fireworks set light to highly flammable sound insulation
• the fire propagated extremely quickly (30 cm/sec) and produced large amounts of toxic black smoke
• the nightclub was crowded about 50 per cent beyond its legal capacity
• many patrons did not know where the emergency exits were and hence a crush and blockage rapidly developed at the main entrance, which was too small for the number of people who attempted to pass through it.

The disaster was filmed in its entirety (which led to the prosecution of the film company for $30 million for allegedly obstructing the exits) and the propagation of the fire was modelled digitally in fine detail.

The West Warwick tragedy was neither the first nor the last nightclub fire with the characteristics listed above. On 30 December 2004, 194 people died in the República Cromañón Nightclub fire in Buenos Aires, and on 1 January 2009 66 people died in a very similar incident, the Santika Nightclub fire in South Korea.

The Kiss Nightclub fire in Brazil occurred on 27 January 2013 in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sur state, Brazil. It killed 230 people and injured 120, 70 of them critically. This event had all the characteristics of previous nightclub fires involving indoor fireworks, highly flammable construction materials, overcrowding, poor management of exits, and thus appallingly high risks and lack of safety for patrons and workers at the locale. Indeed, it is reported that door managers initially tried to prevent people from leaving, as they could not guarantee that bar bills had been paid. It is common in these instances to find lack of emergency training and missing or defective equipment (it is reported that an extinguisher employed to put out the initial fire did not work).

It is particularly striking that at irregular but frequent intervals in different metropolitan areas around the world the same disaster occurs. Everything about it is preventable. Cladding and construction materials should not be highly flammable; electrical systems should be in good condition; there should be adequate fire suppression systems; exits should be adequate, functional and well signed; overcrowding should be avoided; pyrotechnic devices should not be used indoors; and staff should be trained in how rapidly to recognise an emergency situation and manage it to best advantage. Finally, as nightclub owners evidently cannot be relied upon to do these things, local authority and Fire Service enforcement should be sufficient to compel them.

One hopes that Brazil will improve its ability to manage such risks by the time of the 2014 World Cup Football and 2016 Olympic Games.

Reader: if you frequent nightclubs or any similar locales and find emergency exits chained up, or any other evident safety violations, call the police immediately and do not cease to protest until the situation has been resolved.

L'Aquila Sentence - Trial or Witch-Hunt?

March 2009: Mr Giampaolo Gioacchino Giuliani is an amateur seismologist with no formal qualifications in that field. He has specialised in monitoring radon emissions in the hope of finding precursors to damaging earthquakes. Radon is a stable element whose flux is easily detected using the sort of apparatus that is sold to people who are concerned about the health effects of its accumulation in their homes. Slip faulting in areas of crustal stress can increase the radon content of air and groundwater. Hence, it is one potential indicator of enhanced seismic activity and impending earthquakes (Ghosh et al. 2011). Mr Giuliani put his apparatus in the cellar of a school in L'Aquila. When he detected large increases in the radon content of the air, he informed the local, regional and national civil protection authorities, but not the general public.

Nevertheless, word got out. Local people became agitated, as an irregular sequence of small earthquakes had been occurring since October 2008. Faced with public anxiety, the national and local authorities mounted a vigorous campaign against Mr Giuliani, which involved preparations to sue him for punitive damages for 'disturbing the public peace'.

In response to public anxieties, and to the sequence of small earthquakes, the Italian government convened a meeting of the Commissione Grandi Rischi (national Major Risks Commission) in L'Aquila on 31 March 2009. The two-page minutes of the meeting were later published by the weekly magazine L'Espresso (L'Espresso 2009). Present at the meeting were regional functionaries and six professors of geosciences or engineering, all of whom had important managerial appointments in the national civil protection organisation. One was the Director of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology; two were officials of the national Department of Civil Protection.

The consensus of the discussion, as reported in the minutes, is summed up in the following statement:
"Il Prof. Barberi conclude che non c'è nessun motivo per cui si possa dire che una sequenza di scosse di masso magnitudo possa essere considerata precursore di un forte evento." ("Professor Barberi concludes that there is no reason for saying that a sequence of low magnitude shocks could be considered the precursor of a strong event.")
The tone of the discussion, as evinced by the minutes, is more than definite: it is categorical.

It should be borne in mind that the 1703 earthquake in L'Aquila was part of a swarm of shocks: it killed an estimated 6,000 people (Cello et al. 1997). Moreover, there have been other historical examples of earthquake sequences in the central Apennines that have included a main shock.

In reality, such ebullient confidence was probably intended to disguise the fact that the level of local preparedness was far too low to be able to cope adequately with major public disruption.

At 00:30 hrs on Monday 6th April 2009 an earthquake shock occurred that was alarmingly large. It did little damage but it sent many people rushing outside their houses. In Paganica (population 5,024), one of the satellite towns of L'Aquila municipality, the local civil protection organisation sent loudspeaker vans to tour the streets and invite people to calm down and return home. No doubt they were motivated by the policy that had been so stridently set in the meeting of the Major Risks Commission one week earlier. At Paganica, five people were killed in the collapse of their homes, and tens of people were injured.

In Italy, the recession has had the effect of reducing the tolerance that ordinary citizens have of corruption and inefficiency. It has also increased the sense of antipathy that such people have of the political class, which is often known as 'the caste'. A significant number of members of the 'caste' are academics. Not all of them are above reproach. Some of the public opprobrium has been directed to specific cases of corruption, malfeasance or inefficiency, but a significant proportion is unfocussed and indiscriminate.

One development that Italy shares with many other countries is the tendency to turn the locality of a disaster into a crime scene. In L'Aquila, many collapsed buildings were circled with legal tape and posted with official notices indicating that judicial enquiries were underway. The trial of six functionaries of the Civil Protection organisation is a by-product of that process.

In trying to understand the trial and sentence, it is important to bear in mind the context of the recovery from the earthquake of 6 April 2009. L'Aquila is an economic backwater, a mountain city with relatively little dynamism (that, many would say, is its charm). After the earthquake, it underwent a sort of 'forced modernisation' (Alexander 2012). I have argued elsewhere (Alexander 2011) that the process cannot fully be understood using common sense logic, but that it needs instead the application of political logic, which may be a rather different thing. Huge expenditures were made on the basis of political considerations, and the result was a radical--and highly contentious--redefinition of the concept of welfare (see citations for details).

The upshot of this situation was an atmosphere that was very highly charged in political terms--even by Italian standards. Rarely, if ever, has there been an Italian disaster in which the issues were black and white. Even more than usual, L'Aquila bristled with overtones and subtle shades of meaning. It made the scandal of the tardy government response to the 1980 Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake look like a paragon of simplicity.

The move to prosecute the representatives of national Civil Protection was unprecedented in modern European history. This is one among several reasons why few developments have been so roundly misunderstood in international debate. The legal action was seen as an unfair attack on science--lawyers demanding that seismologists predict earthquakes when that is physically impossible. In reality, it was nothing of the sort. The trial was about responsibility for statements that have potentially fatal consequences in terms of public safety.

What we should reflect on is the role of the precautionary principle in legal responsibilities. The six defendants were condemned because they failed to invoke it. It can be argued that, if they had done so, lives might have been saved. That is a hypothetical consideration, but how hypothetical is a matter of debate or conjecture, not measurement.

It is also important to remember that the context of decision making changed radically and abruptly between the pre- and post-earthquake phases. Before the event, the public and official debate was dominated by the question of how to suppress the alarm; afterwards, the issues were more diverse. They included housing the homeless survivors, establishing culpability and limiting public exposure to further risk.

In the end, as much experience in the United States should testify (Hershey 1986), legal action is not a good and efficient means of learning lessons about disaster risk reduction. A less adversarial, but equally penetrating, consensual methodology would be welcome. Meanwhile, there will be moratoria on prediction, warning and preventative action to the risk of imminent disaster, impelled by fear of legal action. That is not a promising milieu in which to create resilience. The trial of the 'Aquila Six' was undeniably full of political overtones--perhaps that is true of all such actions in Italy--but it was also a judicial necessity. Despite that, there have been accusations that the sentence is largely based on what people can remember of their motivations for action on that April night more than three years ago (Nosengo 2012)--perhaps a rather thin motive for condemning seven people to prison. Nevertheless, one hopes that this landmark trial will represent a positive turning point in the assumption of responsibility for civil protection actions.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Civil protection amid disasters and scandals. In E. Gualmini and E. Pasotti (eds) Italian Politics: Much Ado About Nothing? Berghahn, New York and Oxford: 180-197; 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.

Alexander, D.E. 2012. An evaluation of the medium-term recovery process after the 6 April 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, central Italy. Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions 11: 1-13.

Cello, G., S. Mazzoli and E. Tondi 1998. The crustal fault structure responsible for the 1703 earthquake sequence of central Italy. Journal of Geodynamics 26(2-4): 443-460.

Ghosh, D., A. Deb, S.R. Sahoo, S. Haldar and R. Sengupta 2011. Radon as seismic precursor: new data with well water of Jalpaiguri, India. Natural Hazards 58(3): 877-889.

Hershey, N. 1986. Legal perspectives in responding to disasters. Journal of the World Association of Emergency and Disaster Medicine 2(1-4): 96-102.

L’Espresso, 2009. Verbale riunione della Commissione Grandi Rischi, L’Aquila, 31 marzo 2009. L’Espresso magazine, Rome, 17 April 2009.

Nosengo, N. 2012. L'Aquila, la baracconata degli esperti e la sproporzione dei giudici. www.scienzainrete.it (accessed 26 October 2012).

Disaster Goes to School in Italy

In Italy there are 51,674 schools. Sixty per cent of them were constructed before 1974, when anti-seismic building codes were first applied to such buildings. Also, 44 per cent of them have no certificate of structural safety for non-seismic (i.e. static) conditions. One in ten schools (10.3%) is built to antiseismic standards. More than one third of children at school (38%) do not know whether they live in a seismic zone or not. Three fifths (59%) do not know whether their school has an emergency plan (it most probably does not). Two thirds of students (64%) would have no idea whatsoever about what to do in an emergency at school. In the tiny minority of cases in which schools have an emergency plan, it usually only refers to evacuation, and has probably never been tested or made known to participants.

A recent survey of high schools in the circum-Vesuvian area indicated that volcanology and volcanic risk (and also seismic risk) are not included in any way in the curriculum.

After a school collapsed at San Giovanni di Puglia (CB) in 2002, an emergency survey revealed that 6,000 Italian schools in highly seismic zones were extremely vulnerable to collapse in earthquakes. Funds were made available for limited emergency work to improve the structural stability of one third of them.

In recent years, children have died in structural collapses in Italian schools, on occasion under static conditions and not during earthquakes (for example, in the lethal, spontaneous collapse of a classroom at the Rivoli Lyceum, near Turin, in November 2008). Clearly, the potential exists for a major disaster. I have visited schools in highly seismic zones (e.g. the Naples metropolitan area and the Tuscan Lunigiana mountains) which are obvious death traps. I have also worked with school teachers on problems of emergency management, most recently in Umbria. The attitude I have most consistently encountered has been one of complacency and indifference. The tiny minority of school teachers who care about the problem see it as unsolveable because there is no support for any initiatives, either from school authorities or among  parents.

Recent earthquakes in Emilia have put the spotlight on the seismic safety of schools. Once again, disaster at school has been avoided by a lucky combination of circumstances, not by good planning and serious investment. One is sceptical about whether the nation's attention span is long enough to transform the current debate into a clear plan action--and actually follow it.

In reality, good emergency planning for schools is a sophisticated process that requires skill, persistence and widespread participation.* I wish it were considered worth doing. Initiatives have been launched, for example in Como, both to make Italian schools safer by planning and exercising, and also to use school teaching as a means of raising the consciousness of families about major hazards. It is a great pity that they are so sporadic.

Disaster is always followed by a chorus of lamentation and a welter of accusations. This process of being wise after the event, and naive before it, is a sign of immaturity in the disaster risk reduction system. It is time for change.

*See: http://www.slideshare.net/dealexander/emergenza-e-resilienza-a-scuola

See also:

Carlino, S., R. Somma and G.C. Mayberry 2008. Volcanic risk perception of young people in the urban areas of Vesuvius: comparisons with other volcanic areas and implications for emergency management. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 172(3-4): 229-243.

Legambiente 2011. Ecosistema scuola. Rapporto sull'edilizia scolastica, delle strutture e dei servizi. Roma.

On the boycott of Elsevier publications by academics and scientists

At the time of writing, more than 10,000 academics and scientists, mainly in mathematics and the physical sciences, have signed up to a boycott of publications produced and marketed by Elsevier, one of the largest international academic publishing houses, which is headquartered in Amsterdam.  This action has been widely reported in Nature, Science and the quality newspapers. Its justification is Elsevier's allegedly high prices and restrictions on access to its products. The argument runs that public funds paid for science and so the public should have open access to its fruits. That is sometimes, but not always, a plausible argument, but it tends to assume—wrongly—that publication is cost-free.

So far, the boycott has had little or no impact on the earth and environmental sciences operations of Elsevier and no discernable effect on disciplines connected with disaster management. However, it raises some interesting and quite complex questions about academics and how they publish their work.

Let me start by clarifying my position. I have edited more than 3,000 articles and was a Springer editor for 18 years (I knew Konrad Springer in person) and a Blackwell one for nine, as well as a published book author for 22 years. I am now the editor of a new Elsevier serial title, the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, which will shortly start publication. Thus I have a fair experience of commercial publishers. I understand that there are diverse business models. As set out below, I do not fully agree with some of them—but not to the point of wanting to join a boycott.

Even though we all engage repeatedly in publication, many academics are remarkably ignorant about all sorts of aspects of it: the mechanics, graphics, logistics, economics—and the readership (or market, if you prefer). We all support open access, because, for the most part, one of our objectives is to get our material read by as wide an audience as possible. However, no model of publishing is free of costs and commercial risk. Yet few academics are prepared to assume any risks or pay the costs. As the originator of the intellectual property one's rights are not absolute, especially if one shares the responsibility of producing it with a professional publishing house.

I am not convinced that Elsevier is any more guilty than the other major publishers—and a good many of the small ones, whose business models are sometimes considerably less viable and more debatable than those of the publishing giants.

Additionally, there is an important economic relationship between journal and book publishing, in which the funds from one may provide the income stream for investment in the other. Moreover, one should not ignore other cost-benefit relationships regarding longevity of product, continuity of brand and reputation in publishing.

If there is a concern about commercial publishers, it ought to be about the variable balance between unit costs and size of individual markets. I was once the editor of a book series under the auspices of a major player in academic publication. Whereas certain university presses in the USA have a policy of remaindering academic books after four years, the company I served keeps huge inventories indefinitely. That is a good thing. However, it is one reason why the unit costs of their books tend to be very high. The other is innate commercial conservatism. This endows the company in question with a reputation for dependability and high quality production, but it stifles economic risk-taking. As a result, sales of particular books can be very low. One book I was responsible for sold 36 copies in its first year, and this made me feel rather sorry for the author. Such a predicament can be remedied by adopting a more liberal balance sheet for marginal costs and profits in relation to projected sales figures.

Although it is not fair to adopt a "two wrongs make a right" approach, academics themselves are not free of blame. They have many restrictive practices and often suffer from disciplinary insularity. I discussed one of the restrictive practices, academic territoriality, at length in Chapter 1 of my book Confronting Catastrophe (Alexander 2000).

One thing that deserves serious opposition is the journal impact factor system, sometimes identified as the primary bibliometric tool. I believe it is not worthy of intellectual activity to have such an absurd and biassed measure, and I think it does much harm to academic work and no good whatsoever. The whole concept of impact measurement can be dismissed in three words: Thornthwaite, Horton and Huntington. In the 1950s the climatologist Colin Thornthwaite published his seminal field results on evapotranspiration on a Roneo, the ancestor of the modern photocopier machine. The document was distributed all over the world, ending up in many university libraries, and helped make his name synonymous with potential evapotranspiration, a key concept in drought measurement. The publication impact factor was zero. Robert Horton published only one substantial paper in his entire life (Horton 1945), but it made him the father of stream hydrology. And finally, Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 2002. It had an enormous impact and was, in my opinion, a deeply flawed book.

The net result of the use of impact factors to characterise journals has been to boost massively the hegemony of physical over social sciences, as well as to create the illusion that inspiration, cleverness and industry are being recognised. In reality it does nothing for good ideas except, perhaps, restrict their distribution.

While commercial publishers have not opposed impact factors (but neither has anyone else), they are not any more responsible for it than the rest of us.

Nevertheless, there are many ways of ensuring that one's ideas reach a wide audience, or different audiences, but only a minority of academics know how to write well and rigorously in non-academic forms, means by which they can increase their readership at small or no cost. I refer the reader to a paper of mine on exactly that topic (Alexander 2007).

Looked at from a pragmatic point of view, for authors, the first objective is to get published. Average readership of individual academic articles is low (not merely because of any restrictions upon access, but also because of the specialised nature—dare I say the unattractiveness?—of much of what is written. Hence, dissemination is a secondary factor. One can in any case disseminate one's own work to key colleagues.

I would estimate that 70 per cent of academic publishing is motivated by personnel reasons: getting a job, keeping a job, getting tenure (where it exists), getting a higher salary or getting promotion. When I was an academic in the USA a good article in a good journal was worth $500 on my annual salary in perpetuity, thanks to merit raises. These are extraordinarily strong incentives to individuals. The rise of bibliometrics has reinforced this process, as personnel committees tend to "measure the unmeasurable" in order to make comparative assessments of academics.

The whole boycott debate is remarkably uninformed by statistics. In my field, which has 96 journals in it, some of the smaller companies are no cheaper than the major ones. However, Taylor & Francis, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier have much larger distribution networks. Hence, from my own point of view as an author, I can send my work to a high-cost journal published by De Gruyter, Henry Stewart or Inderscience and effectively bury it or I can send my work to Springer, Wiley, Elsevier & co. and be assured of a certain distribution, and hence a significant readership. Incidentally, the same argument does not apply to books, which have a rather different market to journals.

As for the idea of referees boycotting journals, they do that all the time. This is the pinnacle of hypocrisy, as there are plenty of academics who are very vocal when their own work takes a long time to get to review but are always "too busy" when asked to review someone else's work. Being an editor really does teach one about the underbelly of human nature!

In conclusion, I recently submitted a paper to a journal that at the start of the current year ceased to be open access. I am not quite sure why this is so, but I imagine it is because the charitable funding that kept it free to readers simply ran out. Yet someone has to foot the bill, and governments have so far proved remarkably reluctant to do so, whatever the arguments about 'knowledge in the public domain' may or may not be.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Oxford University Press, New York, 282 pp.

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

Horton, R.E. 1945. Erosional development of streams and their drainage basins: hydrophysical approach to quantitative morphology. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 56: 275-370.

Huntington, S.P. 2002. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Free Press, New York, 368 pp.

Preliminary Lessons from the 'Costa Concordia' shipwreck

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 mass of differing perceptions of the event. Whether the crew acted efficiently in the evacuation or not, whether the alarm was sounded in the right manner or not, whether there was panic and how much danger was involved in reaching the shore, and whether the captain abandoned ship before some of the passengers and crew are all examples of matters that were not reported reliably, perhaps with some reason. Despite the purveyance of conflicting information, the reporting was relatively free of the usual distortions. This may have been because the end result of the disaster was much less severe than it could have been if the ship had, for example, sunk in deeper water. Hence, the pervasive desire to blame was muted in this case. Human error undoubtedly played a part, negligence may have been a factor, but there was no great desire to accuse. There might have been in a more severe disaster, and in that case accusations would undoubtedly have been launched more freely. Nonetheless, the media's incessant emphasis on 'human interest' stories provided an unbalanced overview of the difficulties of evacuation, much skewed towards the extreme conditions related by a minority of people who had a relatively 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.