Talk no. 2: Disasters Create Their Own Mythology

Four talks on disaster risk reduction, no. 2

Disasters Create Their Own Mythology

Few phenomena are as easily misunderstood as disasters. As a result, there is a large catalogue of misconceptions that remain dearly held and reluctantly abandoned. Now one would suppose that the experts and professionals in the disasters field (first responders, emergency managers, medical specialists, and so on) would be the first to try and dispel the misconceptions, but this is not always the case. Such people are also members of the general public, and consumers of mass media products. Many of them have not been disabused.

For years, an eminent Belgian medical expert, Dr Claude De Ville De Goyet, has been conducting a campaign—I nearly said "waging a war"—to get the mass media to renounce its faith in misconceptions about disaster. Dr De Ville, or "Doctor Claude", as he is affectionately known by his many admirers (of whom I am one) is not a lightweight player in this field: he is retired from a distinguished career as the World Health Organisation's western hemisphere leader on disaster response, courtesy of the Pan American Health Organisation. And yet even the supposedly responsible mass media, the New York Times, Washington Post and so on, were not interested in responding to Dr Claude's challenge and getting the story right. Evidently, they view the stereotyped story as more attractive to their readers

For convenience, the misconceptions are often referred to as 'myths'. This is reasonable according the the Oxford English Dictionary's second definition of the term, namely: "a widely held but false belief". However, one should bear in mind that many of the misconceptions are better described as statistical inaccuracies rather than outright falsehoods.

My empirical research suggests that the 'myth' which is most dearly and tenaciously held is that "panic is common and widespread in disasters." Why should this be? In my previous talk I discussed the role of theory in "making sense of apparent chaos". If one is unaware of the available body of theory, and thus unable to interpret the complexity of disaster, all that is left is chaos. And chaos is easily equated with panic, especially if one doesn't adopt a particularly rigorous definition of the latter.

The word 'panic' comes from the Greek Pānikos, of Pan, the goat-like shepherd god.  In 490 BC at the battle of Marathon he is said to have shouted so loud that the echoes of his voice as it rebounded from the surrounding mountains convinced the Persians that the Athenian forces were much more numerous than was actually the case, causing tumultuous dread to proliferate among the invaders. Pānikon deima became synonymous with a sudden accession of fear by travellers in lonely places.

In the modern world of science, the trouble with the term 'panic' is that it has several definitions and, as they do not fit well together, it is easily misinterpreted. Sociologists see panic as a social reaction, or more properly an asocial one, involving the spontaneous withdrawal of social contact in favour of an innate self-protective reaction to the sudden manifestation of apparent danger. I am sorry if this definition sounds as if it were written as part of an insurance policy, but the whole concept of 'panic' is hedged around by controversy, and it pays to be cautious when discussing it. There does not have to be a real danger; it is sufficient that one be perceived. The 'self-protective behaviour' need not have a positive, tangible result: indeed, panic can easily lead the panicker into danger, rather than out of it. Moreover, despite its connection with the sudden abandonment of social relations, rather paradoxically, panic can be contagious and result in mob behaviour.

The other group of scientists to have studied panic extensively is, of course, the psychologists. They tend to see it as much more of an innate phenomenon, and as a result they regard it as more common and widespread in the general population than do the sociologists. The one bridge between the two camps is the idea of panic as the sudden—one hopes temporary—suspension of rational judgement in favour of spontaneous reaction. Sociologists have tended to study panic (something they have done for sixty years) in the context of entrapment and flight. The classic situation is a crowded indoor setting in which fire breaks out, and the exits are locked or restricted.

In 1987 Professor Norris Johnson chose panic as the subject of his presidential address to the American Sociological Association. He argued, not only that panic as a common and widespread phenomenon is a misconception, but that panic itself is a myth. Other researchers with expertise in the field believe that, in order to make a point, Professor Johnson went "over the top" and panic is rare but not a chimera.

I would tend to agree. At about 6 p.m. on the 14th February 1981 I was in central Naples in a hotel just off the central square called Piazza Garibaldi. I locked my room and walked down the stairs to street level. Half way down, I was thrown against the wall. I staggered out into the street and came face-to-face with an extraordinary scene. Red faced people were howling like wolves or bawling like angry infants. There was a rumble and part of a building collapsed into the square in a cloud of dust. I joined about 200 people who were desperately running, no one knew where or why. After a few seconds I stopped and started to reason. It was the largest aftershock to follow the 23rd November 1980 magnitude 6.8 southern Italian earthquake.

In reality, few people had given way to hysterics, and they were rapidly and competently dealt with by others who restrained them and restored calm. Panic does occur, and in this case I was a party to it. However, the sociologists have definitively established that it is a rare and transient phenomenon.

In 2003 fire broke out in a heavily overcrowded nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. A disturbing film was taken of the entire incident, which killed 100 people, almost a quarter of those who were present. The film is very graphic and the company that shot it was later sued for $30 million for apparently obstructing the entrance during the evacuation of the locale. This is a classic example of the 'funnel effect', in which people file in ever increasing numbers through an exit that is too small for them. Initially, panic was conspicuous by its absence. It only occurred, briefly, when, in effect "the game was up" and the exit was blocked. The same is true of many other well-known incidents in which lives were lost because evacuation became progressively less easy.

So in reality panic is much less common than is a rational reaction to danger. However, the classic misconceived attitude is that, faced with an urgent predicament, "people will panic", and this is used to restrict the supply of information. Indeed, it is assumed—quite wrongly—that if people are told the truth, they will become so acutely anxious that they will lose their reason.

At 9.45 p.m. on 13th January 2012 the Costa Concordia, the seventh largest passenger ship afloat, struck a rock off the island of Giglio in the Tuscan Archipelago of central Italy. Holed, listing and without power she eventually beached on the island. Of the 4,252 people on board, all but 32 were rescued. It was very fortunate that the Concordia did not sink in the deep marine trench adjacent to where she beached, which would have led to heavy loss of life. When the ship hit the rock there was a booming noise accompanied by rapid deceleration. Loose objects and furniture were thrown violently around, the lights went out and emergency lighting came on. The first action by officials on board was to tell passengers to return to their cabins "while an electrical fault was fixed"—pure expedient fantasy. Fortunately, very few of them obeyed this order, which would have put them at risk of entrapment and drowning, and most of them put on their life-jackets and mustered close to the life-rafts. Evacuation was technically demanding, as during it the ship listed more and more. Nonetheless, passengers and crew reached the shore and remained calm. The order to return to the cabins was a typical example of one given in the interests of stopping a notional state of panic from developing. In reality, people tend to react more rationally if they have realistic information: they are, if anything, more likely to panic without it.

Incidentally, one of the earliest chronicles of mass panic in modern times was the supposed reaction to a drama based on H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, as recited in a radio broadcast by his namesake, Orson Welles. A gullible public in New Jersey were supposed to have believed that the Martians had landed and it was every man—or woman—for himself—or herself. The context of this curious event was provided by the gathering clouds of a World War, a situation in which public anxiety was almost universal. Although it is estimated that 1.2 million people "were frightened" by the story, few of them did anything other than pick up the telephone in order to seek official confirmation of whether or not "something was happening". The mass panic was almost entirely an invention of the newspapers, which were locked in ferocious competition with the radio stations.

But the myth of panic has proved to be remarkably enduring. After the Madrid train bombings of 2003 the Secretary General of an illustrious and ancient British learned society went on television to argue for more secrecy in emergency planning. His rationale was that "people will panic". Besides the fact that this gentleman was a physicist, apparently with no special knowledge of social science, he was merely retailing a shibboleth. So in emergency planning please let us have more openness and less mythology.

The second great misconception is that large disasters inevitably cause epidemics, especially if dead bodies lie around unburied: they are supposed to poison water wells, transmit diseases to the living, contaminate people with their putrefaction, and so on. With an additional eye to the disruption of medical care caused by disaster, after the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the world's mass media confidently predicted that there would be more deaths from disease in the dozen or so affected countries than from the tsunami itself. It was not so.

Instead, we were treated to the spectacle of the western countries effectively exporting their national health systems to Asia. They set them up on the beach-heads and they tended to the sick and wounded. It reminded one of an earthquake in Turkey in which, hours after the event, the international community geared up to send cohorts of doctors to help out: but 2,300 extra Turkish doctors were already at work in the affected area.

The fear of epidemics often leads to hasty and indiscriminate burial. After the 2001 earthquake in El Salvador, the mayor of the town of Santa Tecla authorised a 200-metre-long trench to be dug, and into it bodies and body parts were hastily and indiscriminately flung. When this has been done in the humid tropics, the trenches have sometimes filled up with water before they could be filled with earth, such that the bodies floated away out of them. In Thailand after the 2005 tsunami, indiscriminate burial ended in the need for exhumation and identification of the bodies that had been so hastily and thoughtlessly stashed away.

Indiscriminate burial because of the fear of epidemics has a variety of potential negative consequences. Widows cannot obtain death certificates and may have to wait years before they can receive their husbands' transferrable pensions. Family members cannot grieve and mourn properly; thus are the living demoralised. Causes of death are not properly established and death tolls are not accurately compiled. Excellent opportunities for fraud and chicanery present themselves, and all because of a purely notional fear of epidemics.

The Haiti earthquake of January 2010 killed so many people that the death toll was never properly established. Courtyards and streets were piled shoulder-high with dead bodies. But, although there were serious outbreaks of disease in Port au Prince, they were not caused by the unburied bodies. Indeed, Haiti was the first occasion—after many lost opportunities—in which the competent international authorities (leaders of the Red Cross and so on) stood up in front of the cameras and microphones and categorically stated that epidemics were not going to happen because of any failure to bury human bodies quickly enough.

There are many 'myths' and misconceptions about disasters: in fact, I estimate that at least sixty are in common circulation. For instance, one is that the deadly spores of anthrax appear in the form of a white powder. There were occasions in the early 2000s when mayhem was generated when people found white powders in toilets and other public facilities. As anthrax is greyish-brown or colourless, they were probably looking at talcum powder or cocaine. But they all led to reactions worthy of the response to all-out biological warfare.

There is, of course, a well-known genre of film noire known as the 'disaster movie'. My favourite example is Dante's Peak, the story of how a cataclysmic volcanic eruption affects a small American community. I like it because it features as many as five incompatible styles of volcanic activity, as well as a litany of sociological inaccuracies that is enough to make it a textbook example of exactly what does not happen in disaster.

The Hollywood version of catastrophe is one in which the impact of an extreme event spontaneously unmasks the savage within each of the people involved. They all respond with violence and individualism. Social relations and "civilisation" break down or are summarily dispensed with. If the situation is redeemed, it is the work of a spontaneous leader, a hero in the classic sense of the term, who single-handedly restores order out of chaos.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood model is far more than a fantasy of the cinema. To begin with, it is equally beloved of television. One recalls Woody Allen's dictum that "In Beverly Hills they don't throw their garbage away, they make it into television shows." Worse still, the Hollywood model is also beloved of civil authorities world-wide.

Now it stands to reason that certain parts of the plans and arrangements for dealing with emergencies need to remain confidential. This is true, even though no evidence has ever been presented to suggest that terrorists go down to their local public libraries in order to study emergency plans and thus make their actions more effective—they don't need to do anything of the sort. However, there is an uneasy relationship between secrecy and inefficiency. In fact, secrecy is beloved of those who fear being unmasked because their plans and actions are inadequate, or because they have failed to do their duty. In this respect, secrecy is highly convenient. Hence, the notions that "people will panic" or "terrorists will profit" are great excuses for secrecy—but not for any rational response to hazards and threats.

In the 1960s and 70s the sociologist Alan Barton wrote cogently about the therapeutic community. In this, disaster brings out the best in people: self-sacrifice, abnegation, social consensus, laudable values, and so on. He was right, of course, at least with respect to the early stages of a major emergency (although in the later stages the old divisions in society often reassert themselves with a vengeance).

People do not flee from disaster areas, they converge upon them. Rather than being deserted, the streets of devastated cities throng with relief workers, citizens trying to make the best of things, news reporters, relatives, volunteers and onlookers. Where official order has broken down, perhaps as a result of damage to structures or decimation of institutions, a different order evolves spontaneously to replace it. People discover new, socially valuable roles that they can fulfil. Hence, disaster is not always a completely negative experience: some people may find their inner selves through it; others may rediscover long-lost social values.

So, in fact, disaster can bring out what is best in people, and it often does so. However, in a talk about 'myths' and misconceptions, it would be wrong to imply that the darker side of humanity disappears completely as soon as the earth quakes or the torrential rains arrive. One of the most contentious of the misconceptions is that which relates to looting.

After Hurricane Katrina had passed through New Orleans at the end of August 2005, a pair of photographs circulated around the Internet. Indeed, in current parlance, they "went viral". They showed people up to their armpits in water, carrying small quantities of food and drink. But one photograph, of two white people, had a caption that suggested that they had "found" the food and drink. The other, virtually identical, showed a black person who had "looted a grocery store". Such is journalistic perception and prejudice. Looting did take place in New Orleans, albeit on a much reduced scale compared to what was reported, and, bizarrely, some of it was carried out by the city's police (who were predominantly white).

Katrina fulfilled perfectly the definition of disaster as a "class-quake". Perhaps it is not coincident that New Orleans is the North American city of carnival. In carnival, for a day the king becomes a servant and the servant is king. Whereas the deprived black citizens of the Lower Ninth Ward did not find themselves to be suddenly rich and powerful (indeed, some researchers claim to have evidence that the hurricane was followed by forced migration), nonetheless it was singular that Bangladesh donated $25,000 to the United States' relief appeal.

Incidentally, one effect of Katrina on the academic study of disasters was to give a massive boost to black studies and cultural investigations in this field, both of which had roundly been neglected since the pioneering work in the 1960s by the eminent black sociologist William Anderson. The most startling conclusion of these studies, and of Spike Lee's film about Katrina, When the Levees Broke, is that some black people did not feel that they were even citizens of the United States, a devastating indictment in a country in which school children salute the flag and pledge allegiance every morning.

So looting does occur in disasters, even if it is not always what it seems to be. I believe that to take place it needs preconditions, especially in terms of the existence of pre-existing fault-lines in society: particularly, latent social instability, lack of respect for authority and lack of faith in institutions. Moreover, although disasters tend, in their early stages, to increase the degree of social and moral consensus, this does not mean that criminal elements simply melt away. Indeed, organised crime may see disaster as the golden opportunity to profit from chaos.

This begs the question of the role of the 'black', or informal, economy. It is estimated that about 20 per cent of the world's economy is either informal or illegal. In monetary terms, slightly less than half of this consists of the international trade in narcotics; the rest is made up of trade in armaments, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal gambling activities. Moreover, about half of legitimate trade is cycled through the world's 78 tax havens, and the majority of financial transactions take place for the purposes of short-term speculation. Hence, the small-scale criminal or tax-avoider has some pretty strong competition from the world's millionaires and billionaires.

In disaster, the black economy is a Janus with two faces. It provides work and income to people who would otherwise be destitute, but it deprives the authorities of the revenues needed to fund risk-reduction measures. Moreover, its activities may undermine safety and security and debilitate recovery measures. In Phuket, after the 2005 tsunami, it was estimated that 70 per cent of the local economy was informal. This could not be condemned totally, as it kept so many of the inhabitants alive. But nevertheless, we should be moving towards greater, more honest and transparent governance and greater legitimate public participation in risk reduction activities.

I would now like to change tack and talk about the medical side of disasters. My own studies of earthquakes are tending to suggest that women are disadvantaged with respect to men. They suffer a greater death toll and a heavier burden of physical and psychiatric morbidity. This predicament badly needs investigating further, and many opportunities to do so have been lost to researchers' ignorance or indifference, or at least to an incompatible set of priorities.

In part, problems like this could be reduced by a more efficient medical response to sudden-impact disasters. Instead we find measures such as mass vaccination and sanitary cordons, which waste resources, restrict legitimate initiatives and do nothing to ensure the health of survivors. 'Blanket' measures of this kind are seldom likely to be effective: there are too many ways around them. Yet they remain popular.

Assistance that is indiscriminate or ill-thought-out is the bane of disaster management. In the month after the Armenian earthquake of 1988, 500 tonnes of medicines arrived at Yerevan Airport. Sixteen per cent of them had passed their 'use-by' date. Very few of them were in any way appropriate to the pathologies that had to be treated after a major earthquake. Almost none had explanations in Armenian or Russian of what they were. The net result of this was a month spent vainly trying to catalogue the supplies and then a considerable problem of how to dispose of them. It reminds me that Baroness De Souza once told me that, in Guatemala City after the 1976 earthquake, she saw crates of medicines marked 'not to be used after August 1934'.

Disasters are usually occasions for the outpouring of solidarity. This is all too frequently indiscriminate or badly thought out. For instance, donations of used clothes have included bikinis, dinner jackets, high-heeled shoes, or simply the surplus production of the fashion industry. Apart from the useless garments, local shopkeepers have begged the authorities not to distribute the clothes and ruin their trade. But is this solidarity, or is it dumping? Although the therapeutic community may dominate the local scene, it may not extend quite so readily to the international donors. Fortunately, as experience has mounted, donations have become more effective and more focussed, but this problem has certainly not gone away.

In part it is encouraged by the dilemma of what to do with monetary donations. On the one hand, there is nothing as flexible and appropriate as cash, providing it is used appropriately to stimulate local economic activity and provide welfare where it is genuinely needed. But there are too many occasions on which the money has disappeared into the pockets of the rich and unscrupulous, leaving the disadvantaged survivors destitute. Yet mechanisms to counteract this do exist and can be made use of, and so, for the most part, cash remains a better option than goods.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2005 engendered the greatest outpouring of monetary solidarity ever. Four and a half billion dollars were collected in donations at the same time as a UN-backed appeal for $30 million to help the destitute in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, failed to reach its target. In the world's media, the Darfur situation was a poor relation to the tsunami-wracked beaches of the Indian Ocean.

The tsunami rolled across the holiday beaches of the Western tourists, although not exclusively so. In the mass media of the world's richer countries lent this a sense of immediacy that most Asian disasters cannot emulate, hence the high level of donation. It confirmed the observation, first made decades earlier, that by shining the light of publicity—or not—the mass media can turn solidarity on or off like a tap, irrespective of needs on the ground.

There is a small but cohesive body of academic literature on the behaviour of the mass media in disaster. It concludes that the role of the media is powerful but imprecise. Researchers working in this field appear to suffer from the same malady as disaster managers: they cannot decide whether the media are allies (or at least potential allies) or the devil incarnate. The consensus is that they are a bit of both.

Irrespective of the differences between print media, radio and television, there have traditionally been two kinds of reporting from disaster areas. One is relatively responsible and the journalists involved strive to paint an accurate picture of what is going on. It seems that one cannot expect them to be entirely wise and knowledgeable about disasters, for there is very little sense that journalists as a group want to become expert about disaster. However, with certain limitations, they do their best.

The other group is completely slapdash and will retail all the usual misconceptions without making any effort to confirm or deny them. One gets the impression that their communiques were written in the pub, not on the fault line, and it is probably true. This usually underlines the distinction between the 'quality' and 'tabloid', or 'gutter', press.

My research on the world media's reaction to the Haiti earthquake of 2010 turned up a new and disturbing phenomenon. Politically motivated websites are now reporting the news selectively in order deliberately to distort it in order to support a particular political stance. While it is true that party newspapers have done this for centuries, there is something particularly sinister and insidious about the current fashion to use the Internet to propagate distortions.

Generally, the rise of 'citizen journalism' through Facebook, Twitter and Co. is regarded by researchers as a good thing. However, it should always be borne in mind that this exceptionally fluid and amateur form of disseminating news is also the perfect vehicle for propagating rumour and 'myths' about disaster.

So we live, as the Chinese sage so equivocally said, in "interesting times". After sixty years of intensive study, vast improvements in the speed and efficiency of communication, and the steady march of progress in education, the 'myths' and misconceptions about disaster are still alive and well. Some of them are liable to be crushed by the steamroller of truth, while others are gaining traction.

In conclusion, I would say that modern disasters offer particularly fertile ground for the spread of information. But information is not knowledge, still less wisdom. We should be very careful about what we plant in that ground.

Talk no. 3: Information and Perception: Living Through a Revolution

Four talks on disaster risk reduction, no. 3
Information and Perception: Living Through a Revolution

We live, in the Information Age, or so it is said. According to the pyramidal diagram constructed by the eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, information is the second of four levels of understanding. It renders the base of the pyramid, facts and observations, more powerful by combining them in such a way as to add value, but it lacks the insight and explanatory power of the higher levels, knowledge or wisdom. Hence, information is not wisdom: it constitutes the bricks from which we can, if we want to, build the wall of knowledge, from which, we might, if we are lucky, accede to the lofty heights of wisdom.

Professor Henry Quarantelli, the doyen of disaster sociologists, wrote that the current information and communications technology revolution is about as important for humanity as the invention of printing was in the fifteenth century. He noted its enormous power to transform the way we view the world and hence the way we react to disasters. However, he also listed a dozen unintended consequences that will need to be dealt with, and that may create problems rather than solve them.

We also live in an unstable age, one characterised by vast and profound changes. Many of their most important implications are currently unpredictable and are likely to remain so for a long time. We have glimpsed enormous potential, but do we know how to harness it? The copiousness and unprecedented ease of access that characterise modern information resources pose severe challenges. The first is how to appreciate and utilise such a huge amount of information. How to separate useful from useless information is a pressing problem. So is how to verify the truthfulness of information and interpret its meaning.

The greatest risk is posed by the fact that, when confronted by avalanches of facts and data, the easy way out is to treat them superficially. The bombardment of new information is a sort of solar wind that blows constantly through cyberspace and the mass media. In reaction, the world's attention span is limited and fickle, It passes rapidly from one novel incident to the next. As a result, we have developed an attitude to disasters that brings to mind the ice-cream parlour, home of the 'flavour of the month'. Today as I write, the flavour is 'earthquakes', as two very damaging ones have just occurred in northwest Iran. Perhaps next month it will be floods, or terrorism, or nuclear radiation releases. It all depends upon what happens in the meantime.

Long ago, risk researchers determined that people find it difficult to evaluate risks concurrently, and hence, despite the fact that we all run multiple risks all of the time, we tend to think about them sequentially, one or two at a time. Clearly, in the 'flavour of the month' approach, this is also true of the collective psyche of the mass of viewers, listeners, readers and surfers, the consumers of news (which we all are).

The survivors of the information age are those of us who know how to adapt to it. This not only means adapting the way we seek and assimilate information; something that is now radically different from how we did it half a century ago. It also means learning how to exploit the sources and flows of information and how to commandeer and dominate the interpretations. Verily, the soothsayers have not gone away. They no longer look at the tails of comets and tell us that the gods are angry, but there is no guarantee that a pundit with a strong presence on the dominant mass media will offer anything better, for we live in an age in which the public has developed a chronic appetite for personalities. Incidentally, the original pundits carried the equipment when the British surveyed north India. No doubt it was a repetitive job, because modern punditry certainly is.

One well-known pundit of the modern media was a certain Dr Iben Browning. His chosen field was one of the most contentious in science: the short-term prediction of earthquakes for the purposes of warning people of their imminent arrival. In 1990 he "predicted" (if that is the right word—which it probably isn't) an earthquake in southern Illinois. Modern media do not distinguish well between 'plausible' and 'specious'. Browning is now deceased: he took his earthquake prediction secrets to the grave with him. However, in 1990 he developed a strong and plausible mass media presence that put the official scientists to shame.

No earthquake occurred in southern Illinois during the period specified by Browning, but anxiety proliferated among the local population and there was a significant convergence reaction among the US mass media.

Short-term earthquake prediction may never be feasible. Although there are nine or ten physical phenomena that can undergo characteristic, or 'signature' changes hours or days before earthquakes, the level of uniqueness in slip-faulting mechanisms militates against developing a standardised short-term prediction measure that can be employed with ease around the world. And, incidentally, contrary to public perception, the anomalous behaviour of animals is about the least reliable earthquake precursor, such are the unknown vagaries of the psychology and reflexes of animals large and small. Nonetheless, all physical precursors are being actively, indeed intensively, studied by scientists in the hope that one day there will be a break-through.

The US Geological Survey, as custodian of America's scientific values in this field, examined its navel after the Browning affair and concluded that it had underestimated the power of charlatans to manipulate the media and appear credible. A publicity offensive should have been mounted on behalf of official science. Incidentally, Browning's coup de theatre was the fact that he managed to convince a legitimate geologist that his prediction had substance. The man in question was eventually sacked by his university for misconduct.

Two years later, in 1993, the US Geological Survey issued a prediction for a moderately powerful earthquake on a locked segment of the San Andreas fault in California. By virtue of having a surface expression, the San Andreas enjoys a public image that few other active faults can aspire to (most of them are deeply buried). The role of cowboy films and Easy Rider can perhaps be detected in the fact that equally spectacular surface faults in China and Venezuela remain unknown to the world's media audiences.

Parkfield, California, lies astride the locked segment of the fault. In 1993 it had a population of 57, plus 300 scientific instruments, 80 of which were continuously recording. Within days of the start of the USGS's 'Parkfield Earthquake Experiment', the local population had swollen to over 2,000, a motley combination of media representatives, New Agers and the curious and idle. But after 18 months the experiment ended without a significant seismic event—and even today it still hasn't occurred.

Official reports by the US Geological Survey make it clear that a 90 per cent probability of a magnitude six earthquake also means a perfectly respectable ten per cent probability of nothing at all. And that is what transpired. It reminds me that I once attended an earthquake conference at which the flower of Californian seismologists congregated in a flimsy looking room that projected outwards from the first floor of a monastery (a 1930s edifice, not something Mediaeval—this was California), about ten kilometres from the San Andreas fault. It was interesting, if somewhat macabre, to speculate what would have happened if the 'big one' had occurred while we were all in that room, but such thoughts took no account of the hard reality of probabilities. And if probabilities did not enter into my considerations, they are positively shunned by the general public.

It is an interesting exercise to type 'earthquake prediction' into an Internet search engine. Bona fide, official science has its websites, and these explain that long-term, regional earthquake prediction is effectively a solved problem with routine procedures, but short-term transient prediction is no more than an elusive goal. What is worrying, however, is that there are many other websites that confidently predict major earthquakes all over the place, and usually the day after tomorrow. Hence, the Internet has given free rein to the charlatans. Although the science behind their activities is false or suspect, the visual impact of their sites is usually as good as that of the USGS. And because it is the Internet the sites are not policed.

Many a legitimate scientist would like to be the one who is remembered for ever after as being the person who cracked the problem of how to predict an earthquake reliably in the short term. The fact that earthquakes do commonly emit precursors makes this goal seem tantalisingly near at hand. Fortunately, bona fide science has its in-built protection mechanisms which ensure that legitimate scientists do not make unjustifiable leaps of faith, and that charlatans are excluded from the circle of practitioners. But does the public realise this? The socio-economic implications of earthquake prediction are potentially enormous: house prices may dip, people may not go to work, children may be kept away from school, residents may leave the area, psychological pathologies may develop, and so on. In other words, the stakes are high in both the negative and the positive senses, for being able to predict imminent earthquakes could indeed save lives if it were coupled with a well-rehearsed plan of action.

In 2004 a talented Israeli sociologist, Avi Kirschenbaum, published a book about disasters. The body of his text reported a well-executed but fairly standard social survey of how the Israeli population reacts to threats, hazards and emergencies—a kosher piece of work. However, there was something radically different about his first and last chapters. In Chapter 1, Kirschenbaum plotted the number of disasters, worldwide, against the dates on which important disaster management organisations were founded. He discovered a significant correlation. Now, most researchers would automatically assume that the organisations, associations and agencies were founded in response to the disasters. In individual cases, that is often so. However, Kirschenbaum thought the opposite. He argued that there are increasing numbers of disasters because there are increasing numbers of disaster management agencies, not the other way around. His thesis was that these organisations have a vested interest in self aggrandizement and therefore tend to inflate the number of disasters and the magnitude of their impacts. In reality, he wrote, the increases in the size and frequency of disasters have been relatively modest.

Kirschenbaum's last chapter contained a radical proposition. Having argued that the world can ill afford such rampant inflation in the number of disaster management agencies, he suggested that the best thing to do would be to make disaster response a fee-for-service activity. If a person, or a family, does not subscribe to it, they will receive no help when the next disaster occurs. Since Kirschenbaum was writing in the early 1990s privatisation has become more and more fashionable and has been applied with careless abandon to many public services in many countries. Why not civil protection? Parts of it are already in private hands anyway, for example in branches of many countries' health services.

In my view there are too many considerations about welfare and the care of the vulnerable for such an approach to be morally justifiable. I will return to this issue in my next talk. But for the time being I would like to point out that Kirschenbaum's book should be required reading. It is a sort of "intellectual cod liver oil" for disaster specialists: it tastes bad but it does you good.

Is 'virtual reality' an oxymoron? And in any case, what is reality? An enduring image comes to my mind. It shows a village ruined by earthquake. All the houses are visibly damaged, and some have collapsed. They have been abandoned by their occupants, with one exception. This is the coffee bar at the centre of town, which has reopened with temporary connections to electricity and water supplies. Inside it there is a party of local residents who are grouped around a television screen. They are watching an image of a town that has been ruined by earthquake and abandoned by its inhabitants, except for one building at its centre. Possibly it is their own town.

This early and rather primitive example of a sort of virtual reality highlights the importance of perception of hazards, risks and disasters. Although perception studies have been conducted in this field for the past seventy or eighty years, they have only really come into their own since the 1970s. In part, this is an effect of the development in the 1970s of the concept of subjective risk (as opposed to measurable 'objective risk' based on hard data about probabilities). In the end, perception equals money, because it can be equated with what people are prepared to pay for safety and what services they are not prepared to underwrite because they perceive them as being unacceptably risky.

Disaster risk is a parallel world to the one we live in. I will go further: risk does not exist. I hasten to add that despite that it is no less real. But risk is like friction, it only comes into play when it is mobilised. We can never make a direct measurement of risk: what we measure in its stead is impact, and by then the risk is over and done with.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that risk has proved such an elusive phenomenon, easily misunderstood, seldom perceived accurately (if accuracy is possible) and in many cases feared and dreaded.

Our parallel world is not merely inhabited by risk, it is increasingly subject to risk aversion. A risk is regarded as 'dreaded' if it is considered intolerable. What is tolerable is a matter treated with great elasticity. I mentioned in a previous talk that the glare of publicity can turn on the flow of solidarity; and turning off the stream of reporting can stifle the process of donation. Likewise, the degree to which a risk is feared or dreaded—conversely, the extent to which it is accepted—depends at least in some measure on publicity.

In the mid-1960s in a classic article in Science magazine, the risk analyst Chauncey Starr declared that "a thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable". Hence, safety is a variable factor, indeed, one that varies over time. This means that it is also malleable. In that sense, the mass media are the mirror of what society is thinking and of its sense of values. But it is a two-way relationship, in many ways, more or less subtle, the media can create society's agenda. It can very easily pander to people's prejudices.

One evening I turned on the television news and the top story was a train crash which had occurred that afternoon at a place called Crevalcuore (which translates into English rather aptly as "break-heart"). Nineteen people died when two trains crashed head-on in fog on a single-track line. News is, of course, not merely a question of reporting the facts, but also involves putting a spin upon them, emphasising a particular angle, and selectively reporting the details. Evidently in this case the television news editors had a grudge against the state railways. The news bulletin gave the distinct impression that it would be far safer to get on the motorway and drive like a maniac in thick fog than set foot in a train. Trains are actually a very safe means of transport in Europe, yet on a previous occasion the same news service had reported the deaths of six passengers in a crash as a "massacre", while the deaths of six times as many people in road accidents during the same weekend was treated as a "normal", unexceptional statistic.

These rather crude examples illustrate how the goalposts in the game of safety are constantly being shifted. The threshold of what is considered tolerable and what is treated as a disaster migrates over time. And of course it differs greatly from one part of the world to another. A flash flood in Mogadishu killed 118 people, but as it came at a time when conflict was raging in Somalia and there was daily mortality due to fighting. Because, moreover, many vital life-support services had broken down, the flood was hardly a disaster at all, or at least it was hardly distinguishable from the disaster that was daily life.

Stalin once famously observed that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic—he more than any of his contemporaries other than Hitler should have known. Perhaps the great misfortune of our time is our ability to decouple large death tolls from the human tragedy.

But let us return to the information technology revolution. Disasters have always had a symbolic value, and different cultures have ascribed to them different symbols and associated them with interpretations. Following the Golden Bough of Sir James Frazer, magic involves the covariance of unrelated actions, event and consequence without a true cause and effect. The very term disaster, "dis-astro", means "bad star" and thus refers to the role of the stars and planets in causing extreme terrestrial events, or bad luck on earth. Science has established a more enduring set of causal relationships (although not without mistakes, setbacks, controversies and inaccuracies), but curiously this has not led to the demise of symbolism, only its metamorphosis.

Nowadays, we talk incessantly about 'icons'. Clearly, we do not mean venerated paintings of the Madonna and Child. We mean reductive symbols. Whether they are small diagrams or people who embody some characteristic (usually celebrity), the modern idea of the icon is to be able to reduce reality to a simple, perhaps fleeting, piece of symbolism. The symbolic value of disasters has changed—somewhat—but it has not diminished.

In January 2012, the Costa Concordia cruise ship foundered on a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea and beached on a Mediterranean island. Ships have always been a metaphor for society, and perhaps that is one reason why churches have naves. We travel through time in notional vessels and we endeavour to float on a sea of life made turbulent by vicissitudes. And there on the Island of Giglio we had the biggest loss of a passenger ship in history, for the Concordia is two and a half times the size of the RMS Titanic. We also had a brave, thoroughly modern, venture that came to grief on the unforgiving rocks of an ancient marine basin. Destiny struck. It is perhaps small wonder that the Concordia was immediately likened to the European economy, as it foundered on the recklessness of bankers, the profligacy of governments and the tax avoidance of citizens.

Information technology has greatly aided a process of separating the protagonists from the bystanders. For the majority, disaster is a spectacle to be enjoyed. The condiment sprinkled on top of each daily dose is the realisation that it is all happening to someone else and one can be thankful for such deliverance. For the sizeable minority, it represents suffering, hardship, pain and inconvenience. We the privileged watch this from the ringside as if we were immune. We are not.

I sometimes think that international terrorism perpetrated in Western countries is nothing more than an attempt to re-import the risk that such nations have so successfully exported to the less privileged countries via the globalised economy and its insistence on the exploitation of labour.

Meanwhile, information technology has succeeded in inverting the status of victims. One theory of disasters is that they are a source of moral outrage, which is usually directed against the institutions that have signally failed to protect citizens who put their faith in them. This, incidentally, forms part of a general drift away from the concept of personal responsibility for bearing risks. However resilient society has become, individuals in Western countries are probably less resilient and less resourceful than they were sixty years ago when the state could do relatively little to help them overcome the problems of disaster. But now the individual can easily become the harbinger, or purveyor, of moral outrage. Its handmaidens are the lawyers and accountants whose presence has been substituted for common sense.

A century ago, or even less, to be the victim of disaster was to bear a burden of disgrace and shame. Nowadays, the victim may be featured on a chat show, is possibly on first-name terms with a cabinet minister, and is certainly equipped with a powerful weapon: moral outrage. There are, of course, those victims who use such equipment to labour tirelessly and selflessly for the greater good of safety and disaster risk reduction. There are others who exploit it for all it is worth and assume the symbolic mantle for shameless self-aggrandizement. The public's voracious appetite for personalities, and the ease with which interactions can occur in the age of digital telecommunications, mean that the less scrupulous protagonists of modern disaster are as likely to be applauded as vilified.

Business continuity management is the art and science of doing two things simultaneously. One is keeping a crisis under control by tackling its root causes and its effects on the ground. The other is vigorously defending the reputation of one's company. Reputation equates to stock-market value, consumer confidence and a host of other monetary variables. Of course, it can be difficult to defend a reputation when the underlying crisis management is hopelessly inadequate, but there are many who have tried. It is certainly a bad idea to manage a crisis faultlessly with the exception of a plummeting reputation.

Hence, it is notable that in the present age as much effort seems to go into creating the impression that things are being done as goes into actually doing them. Hence we return to virtual worlds. Disasters and crises are managed, and so, in parallel, is the impression that they are being managed.

So, whether reality is 'virtual' or real, we live increasingly in parallel worlds. The symbolic value of disasters may be no less real than is risk, which in turn is no less real than the actual impacts of disaster, but there are disjunctures between all of these things. Noam Chomsky argued cogently that public consent is manufactured, rather than obtained. Information is a primary resource and, despite all the talk of free flows, it is quite still rigidly controlled. What I mean here is that you can believe anything you like, but if too many people believe "the wrong thing" then corrective action must be taken.

Official attitudes to disasters on the part of governments are quite variable. Shame is often one of them, along with concealment, political opportunism another. In some cases, moreover, governments are as likely to listen to celebrities as they are to scientific experts. Or perhaps I am being too negative. Dr Ilan Kelman has shown, in more than 30 detailed examples, that disasters are often the occasion for the renewal of diplomatic initiatives. The field of disaster diplomacy got underway in 1999 after earthquakes in Greece and Turkey occurred in quick succession. The two countries were at loggerheads over a territorial dispute, but the mutual process of offering post-earthquake assistance jump-started the diplomatic solution to their dispute.

Whatever the attitudes of governments, and the efficacy, or not, of disaster diplomacy, there is a growing consensus that we need a world community of disaster risk reduction protagonists, composed of scientific experts and leading decision makers. Information and communications technology, and mass travel, have genuinely contributed to the creation of a 'global village' in which the plight of disadvantaged people and their communities is now impossible to ignore.

As each of us participates in global village life, we must adapt to changes, driven by technology, that are faster and more profound than those our forebears had to deal with. Let us try to make sure that we build a full pyramid: not merely information, nut knowledge in the service of wisdom.