The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)

by Lucy Jones

accept that, sometimes, shift just happens.

Haha!

we see the straightforward moral failing of putting personal short-term gain over the health and safety of our family and others in our community.

The flow rate that has only a 1 percent chance of being reached at any time in one year is called the hundred-year flood.

The reality of a river is whatever land is needed to accommodate its flow.

it is only 1 in 50. Forty-nine of those fifty clusters will produce nothing. So what should be said to the public? That the risk has gone up by two hundred times? Or that there is a 98 percent chance that nothing will happen?

With each passing year the enviable physical, economic, and social circumstances of the United States are more vulnerable to natural and technological hazards….[The United States] has been—and still is—creating for itself increasingly catastrophic future disasters.

But demanding that building owners repair their unreliable structures is a more difficult proposition. After all, they have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Shouldn’t they be entitled to make their own choices, no matter how reckless?

steer people away from fear, reminding them that they would have to pay for the earthquake at one time or another, before or after, so why not avoid the damage altogether?

Even though building owners would have to pay the full cost, we had convinced them they had more to lose by not retrofitting.

they had come to understand how much they stood to lose if their neighbor didn’t do so.

To effectively manage disasters, we must, as communities and individuals, focus on three different times: we must adequately build and retrofit our structures before the event, to minimize damage; we must respond effectively during the event, to save lives; and we must come together as a community after the event, to recover.