Disaster predictions will become more accurate, but what difference will it make? Will it save lives, or even change behavior? Tokyo’s nine million residents are today fully aware that their city is due for a massive earthquake; last year, the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute calculated that there is a seventy per cent likelihood that an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 or higher will hit the city by 2016. A 7.0 earthquake would kill eleven thousand people and cost Japan a trillion dollars. Angelenos who continue to buy multi-million-dollar houses on the escarpment of the San Gabriel Mountains—”on the steep slopes where the subdivisions stop and the brush begins” —know that the mountains want nothing more than to slide into the sea. Phoenix knows that it’s running out of water, Miami knows that it’s sinking into the Atlantic Ocean, and Seattle knows that it’s due for a reprise of the 9.0 megathrust earthquake that hit in 1700.
Anybody who had bothered to read the 1995 Metro New York Hurricane Transportation Study issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, or historical accounts of previous hurricanes that hit New York City—such as the 1821 storm that caused the East River to meet the Hudson in what is now SoHo—would have been prepared for the extent of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. We also already know how much more severe the destruction will be when a stronger storm hits. Sandy was no longer a classified as a hurricane when it made landfall on the New Jersey coast, but a post-tropical cyclone; a Category 3 hurricane hit New York as recently as 1938.
And the Philippines had no delusions about the risks posed by typhoons. It had plenty of experience to draw from: the nation endures an average of twenty typhoons annually. Nobody knows exactly when the city of Tacloban—one of the areas hardest hit by Haiyan—first came into existence, because the city’s original municipal records were destroyed in a typhoon. The six most destructive examples in recorded history have all occurred since 1990, and average storm intensity and sea level continue to rise every year. In May, the executive director of the Philippines’ National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council acknowledged that global warming posed an “existential threat” to the nation.
We know all of this, but we continue to live in the path of catastrophe. Many millions of people, of course, don’t have a choice—they cannot afford to move. But those who can leave—especially those who can leave—tend to stay. To rebuild is heroic; to move is a retreat, an act of cowardice.
- More Here
Anybody who had bothered to read the 1995 Metro New York Hurricane Transportation Study issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, or historical accounts of previous hurricanes that hit New York City—such as the 1821 storm that caused the East River to meet the Hudson in what is now SoHo—would have been prepared for the extent of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. We also already know how much more severe the destruction will be when a stronger storm hits. Sandy was no longer a classified as a hurricane when it made landfall on the New Jersey coast, but a post-tropical cyclone; a Category 3 hurricane hit New York as recently as 1938.
And the Philippines had no delusions about the risks posed by typhoons. It had plenty of experience to draw from: the nation endures an average of twenty typhoons annually. Nobody knows exactly when the city of Tacloban—one of the areas hardest hit by Haiyan—first came into existence, because the city’s original municipal records were destroyed in a typhoon. The six most destructive examples in recorded history have all occurred since 1990, and average storm intensity and sea level continue to rise every year. In May, the executive director of the Philippines’ National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council acknowledged that global warming posed an “existential threat” to the nation.
We know all of this, but we continue to live in the path of catastrophe. Many millions of people, of course, don’t have a choice—they cannot afford to move. But those who can leave—especially those who can leave—tend to stay. To rebuild is heroic; to move is a retreat, an act of cowardice.
- More Here
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