Andy Ho, Straits Times 4 Feb 10;
AMONG the most embarrassing reports from Haiti are those about its elite. The Jan 12 quake which destroyed much of Port-au-Prince spared its wealthy eastern suburb of Petionville. The mansions there were simply better constructed than most other buildings in the capital.
For Petionville residents - mostly fair-skinned descendants of the French colonialists who controlled the slave plantation economy until independence in 1804 - the genteel life continues. Meanwhile, the black denizens of the shanties in downtown Port-au-Prince who survived the temblor are still on the streets. Relief aid isn't arriving fast enough and most of it will go to Petionville residents, in any case, 'through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses', as The Washington Post noted.
This unequal distribution of the consequences of the quake is quite typical of natural disasters. In ancient times, a disaster - from dis + astro or 'bad star' - was believed to involve the baleful forces of nature striking humans. But though natural hazards may be unavoidable, they become tragedies only when human decisions result in the most vulnerable bearing most of the suffering.
There are various economic and political factors which cause the consequences of natural disasters to be unequally distributed. But only limited progress has been made in analysing them, which could be one task for the multi-disciplinary Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management that Nanyang Technological University launched last month.
In the 1970s and 1980s, disaster studies focused on how human extractive activities like logging led to deforestation, the silting of rivers and so on. In the 1990s, experts recognised how the consequences of such tragedies were non-randomly distributed by race and income.
In the last decade, their causes were also recognised to be non-random too. Thus, almost all toxic emissions in the United States and Japan come from 5 per cent of their economic activity, almost all located in the poorest communities. Who makes these location decisions? The rich and powerful, of course.
Because natural disasters are assumed to impact just those who happen to be caught in their paths, researchers neglected to look for the social, economic or political factors influencing their impact on people. Instead, their focus has largely been on emergency preparedness, disaster recovery and the like.
The places that are historically prone to quakes or hurricanes are already very well known. Thus when people build in such locations, they do so hoping not to be struck in the near future. Or perhaps they believe they will survive the disaster should it occur.
It was Yale sociologist Charles Perrow who introduced the notion of 'normal accidents'. That is, given the extent to which we depend today on complex systems - power generation, for example, or sewage disposal - multiple catastrophes just waiting to occur are actually built into the fabric of our lives.
Professor Perrow further argues in The Next Catastrophe that instead of assuming a natural disaster is naturally a tragedy, we should look for human causes that turn it into one at any particular location.
On Aug 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept down on New Orleans, breaking the levees on the Mississippi river. Some 1,300 people perished in the floods that destroyed 69,000 houses and racked up US$100 billion (S$140 billion) in losses.
In 1965 and 1969, respectively, hurricanes Betsy and Camille took the same path as Katrina did but caused much less damage. Betsy saw a quarter of the city flooded but only 76 people perished. Stronger levees were then built - but Katrina flooded 80 per cent of New Orleans.
While Katrina stories usually focus on the broken levees, the fact of the matter is Louisiana had more public funding for levee construction than any other state in the five years before Katrina occurred. What mattered more was the building of a 122km long, ramrod straight, deepwater canal that directly connected the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the freshwater of the Mississippi River.
Completed in 1968, it allowed sea water to penetrate very far inland. The salinity killed plants in the wetlands around the river that had long buffered New Orleans from storm surges. Between 1965 and 2005, one million out of four million acres of wetlands were lost thus. Sans wetlands to sponge up hurricane storm surges, the straight canal provided an unobstructed path for and amplified the Katrina flood waters. The levees broke and the rest is history.
Researchers have established that the authorities knew before building the canal that it could destroy the wetlands and raise the risk of hurricane flooding. But it was built, nevertheless, to transform river town New Orleans into a seaport. Over the decades, however, the crooked Mississippi river still carried 250 times more freight than the straight canal. The latter was prone to silting and was re-dredged frequently, which obstructed traffic.
The background to Katrina shows how it was human actions that turned a natural hazard into a tragedy. Prof Perrow argues that spreading out populations now concentrated in hazardous regions will reduce the risks in case of another Katrina.
But the poor have few relocation options. Those trapped in New Orleans as the flood waters rose were mainly poor blacks with no transportation out.
Because Katrina led to significant silting, big vessels can no longer use the canal. By July last year, a rock barrier had been constructed to plug the canal, which will be closed. But should another hurricane make landfall before the wetlands are restored, which could take decades, the poor will bear its brunt - again.
