The human factor in so-called “natural” disasters
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011Our family was fortunate this past weekend in not experiencing any property damage or loss of power from Hurricane Irene. 700,000 other residents of Connecticut were not so lucky. However, as I have thought about this disaster and others through which I lived during my lifetime, I have increasingly realized that much of the devastation of natural disasters is not “natural.”
Sometimes, the influence of bad human decision making on the scope of a disaster is obvious: Hurricane Katrina would not have been anything more than just another bad Gulf Coast hurricane, had the levees protecting big portions of New Orleans not failed to protect the city against water damage. The levees were not built to protect against Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, so a disaster of the type that happened was inevitable and experts were not surprised when it happened. Experts warned of this kind of problem, but were ignored year after year. Nevertheless, most of the time, we forget the degree to which we can anticipate disasters and minimize their impact.







