A Paradise Built in Hell (21 page)

Medical historian Judith Leavitt points to two smallpox outbreak cases to demonstrate the way that behavior of those in power shapes a crisis and the value of an open society. One, in Milwaukee in 1894, was made far worse by a public health officer who allowed middle-class and upper-class people to quarantine themselves, “whereas, in the poor immigrant sections of the city, he used forcible removal to the isolation hospital. And you can imagine that discrimination there was not helping, so the smallpox . . . spread citywide. There was this phrase, ‘the scum of Milwaukee’ in the newspapers quite a bit, and the people who lived on the south side of Milwaukee felt that that’s the way the rest of the city viewed them, as the ‘scum of Milwaukee’ and, therefore, it didn’t matter what you did to them, so there was definite unequal application of the policy. And the immigrants responded by not reporting cases of smallpox, by hiding them when people came to the door. And ultimately, by rioting against forcible removal, and against vaccination.” Suspicion of the vaccination’s safety and effectiveness was the other unfortunate factor, along with class conflict and elite panic.

In 1947, smallpox came to New York City very much the way that bubonic plague came to New Orleans in
Panic in the Streets
, but the institutional response was utterly different. The public was treated as an ally. Leavitt recounts, “There were signs and buttons around everywhere, ‘Be safe. Be sure. Get vaccinated.’ There were multiple daily press conferences and radio shows about the diagnosis when it finally came, the spread of it, every case was announced, and there was a perception, and I would argue also a reality of honesty and justice from the Health Department and from the city government at this time, because people felt they were being informed as things were unfolding. In two weeks, five million New Yorkers were vaccinated.” Coercion was used elsewhere: “The drug companies were a little less cooperative until Mayor O’Dwyer locked them into City Hall and said you are going to produce more vaccine, and you’re going to do it very quickly, or you’re not leaving this building, and they surprisingly agreed. . . . It was a voluntary vaccination program so those people standing in line were there in a voluntary fashion. Public compliance was incredibly high. Now I don’t have to remind you that this is immediately post-World War II, and that did have something to do also with the level of organization in the city and the cooperative effort.”

Even so, in 2005, federal officials in the United States from the president to the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speculated that a militarily enforced quarantine would be required were a new epidemic to break out: they were planning to go the route of Milwaukee, not New York City. And when the Indiana National Guard decided to simulate a radioactive disaster in a 2007 training exercise, they hired civilians to play rioters and looters charging at medical personnel and even stealing stretchers. (“It’ll make a good snowboard” one stretcher thief remarked unconvincingly, apparently trying to rationalize his puzzling role.) Elite panic and the mindset behind it are hard to eradicate. They were half the disaster that San Francisco faced in 1906 and that New Orleans faced in 2005.

Quarantelli was Tierney’s professor, but the phrase “elite panic” was coined by her peers, Rutgers University professors Caron Chess and Lee Clarke. Clarke told me, “Caron said: to heck with this idea about regular people panicking; it’s the elites that we see panicking. The distinguishing thing about elite panic as compared to regular-people panic, is that what elites will panic about is the possibility that we will panic. It is simply, more prosaically more important when they panic because they’re in positions of influence, positions of power. They’re in positions where they can move resources around so they can keep information close to the vest. It’s a very paternalistic orientation to governance. It’s how you might treat a child. If you’re the mayor of a city and you get bad news about something that might be coming your way and you’re worried that people might behave like little children, you don’t tell them. You presume instead that the police are going to maintain order, if the thing actually comes: a dirty bomb, a tornado, a hurricane into lower Manhattan. As we define it, elite panic, as does general panic, involves the breaking of social bonds. In the case of elite panic it involves the breaking of social bonds between people in positions that are higher than we are. . . . So there is some breaking of the social bond, and the person in the elite position does something that creates greater danger.

“In Three Mile Island, there was an evacuation of nearly 150,000 people. It was mainly a self-directed evacuation. The officials weren’t in charge of it. By all accounts it was quite orderly.” Yet Clarke is often asked, “‘Well, what about the panic at Three Mile Island?’ That wasn’t panic, the elites panicked there. They didn’t know what was going on inside the reactor, [neither] the people on-site nor Governor Thornburg. And finally the governor issued a declaration and he advised women, especially of child-bearing age, and children to evacuate. Scientifically for good reason, their bones and fetuses are more vulnerable, but all those other people who are not those things said, “hey, I’m going to go too. It seems to make good sense to me.” And we later discover that the reactor was perhaps thirty minutes away from breeching containment, half of the thing melting down. So what happens? The elites in that case, they’re afraid people are going to panic so they hold the information close to the vest about how much trouble the reactor is in.” Imagining that the public is a danger, they endanger that public.

Praising Tierney’s work, Clarke wrote, “Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones currently in vogue. The chief prescription is, she notes, that the best way to prepare for disasters is by following the command and control model, the embodiment of which is the federal Department of Homeland Security. Thus do panic myths reinforce particular institutional interests. But it is not bureaucrats who will be the first-responders when the next disaster, whether brought by terrorists or some other agent, comes. It won’t even be the police or firefighters. It will be our neighbors, it will be the strangers in the next car, it will be our family members. The effectiveness of disaster response is thus diminished to the degree that we overrely on command and control. This is another case where political ideology trumps good scientific knowledge about how the world works.”

Tierney moderates her critique of institutions to say that the United States at least has civilian systems of response, relief, and recovery. This, she adds, is an advance upon the era when recovery was considered to be a job for private philanthropy, while emergency response in other countries is often still delegated to the military (as it ultimately was in Hurricane Katrina in the United States). She approves, too, of the growing ranks of trained emergency managers. Many disaster scholars concur that if public awareness on disaster behavior is lagging, institutional planning is changing for the better. And it’s important to break up the monolith of the state into the various departments with various responses that constitute institutional behavior in any disaster: in 1906 San Francisco, the police conducted themselves far more reasonably, perhaps because they were rooted in the communities they served; in Halifax, most agencies behaved well; on the morning of 9/11 the Centers for Disease Control responded rapidly and appropriately; in Hurricane Katrina the Coast Guard distinguished itself for performing a maximum of rescues with a minimum of fuss and fear. Responses vary.

Asked how decades of studying disaster had influenced her political beliefs, Tierney responded, “It has made me far more interested in people’s own capacity for self-organizing and for improvising. You come to realize that people often do best when they’re not following a script or a score but when they’re improvising and coming up with new riffs, and I see this tremendous creativity in disaster responses both on the part of community residents and on the part of good emergency personnel—seeing them become more flexible, seeing them break rules, seeing them use their ingenuity in the moment to help restore the community and to protect life, human life, and care for victims. It is when people deviate from the script that exciting things happen.”

 

 

 

Her trust in human beings in the absence of governance is at odds with that of most who govern. After all, the elites of Britain before World War II anticipated that the citizenry would fall apart, while the American leaders plotting nuclear wars astonishingly concluded that the survivors posed more of a threat than the bombs themselves. My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image. In a society based on competition, the least altruistic often rise highest. In staying there, they play out a drama far more akin to the scenarios of Social Darwinism than anything Kropotkin found in Siberia. Those in power themselves are often capable of being as savage and self-serving as the mobs of their worst fears. They also believe that they are preventing crime when they commit it. General Funston having citizens shot as looters believed he was somehow saving the city, and the officials and vigilantes in Hurricane Katrina unloosed even more savage attacks on the public because that public was portrayed as a monster out of control—a collective King Kong or Godzilla, as we shall see. At large in disaster are two populations: a great majority that tends toward altruism and mutual aid and a minority whose callousness and self-interest often become a second disaster. The majority often act against their own presumptive beliefs in selfishness and competition, but the minority sticks to its ideology. Disaster cannot liberate them, even while many others find themselves in an unfamiliar world playing unfamiliar roles. Certainly it was so in San Francisco in 1906, in the big Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But in Mexico, the majority mattered most, with extraordinary consequences.

O
ne disaster utopia lasted. During the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, citizens discovered each other, their own strength, and the superfluity of what had seemed like an omnipotent and pervasive government, and they did not let go of what they discovered. It reshaped the nation. The real disaster began long before the earthquake, just as the utopia of social engagement and community strength lasted long after—and existed more vigorously than in much of the United States before as well. Utopia itself is rarely more than an ideal or an ephemeral pattern on which to shape the real possibilities before us. Mexicans tasted it and took steps to make it a larger part of everyday life.

Marisol Hernandez was a young single mother taking her son to day care on her way to work as a seamstress in a Mexico City sweatshop on the morning of September 19, 1985. Twenty-two years later, she said, “I wasn’t at work yet because we came in at 8:00 a.m. and I was taking my child to the nursery; he was two years old. We were in the metro—I was in there with him when it happened.” As people so often do, she continued onward as though everyday life still existed. She worked in the Pino Suárez neighborhood of sweatshops and garment factories just south of the Zócalo, the huge plaza at the heart of the immense sprawl of Mexico City, the symbolic center of the nation. Though she is no longer young and her life was never easy, the only sign of time on Hernandez’s smooth oval face is that she looks no particular age as she speaks intently of that moment of rupture. “I went to the nursery to leave my son and went walking because the metro and the transportation wasn’t functioning, but the ground was all broken up and the buildings had collapsed. I walked to Pino Suárez, but already everything had collapsed. I think I was at the point of losing my reason as I was seeing all of that. A long time passed where I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

The earthquake that hit that morning at 7:19 lasted an endless two minutes, while buildings swayed and shook and cracked and millions were awakened, startled, shaken, or crushed at the beginning of their day. Among the buildings that toppled or fell to pieces were many recent structures built badly under corrupt regimes. The builders had used substandard materials or skimped on reinforcing steel, and the officials in charge of safety had looked the other way. Particularly hard hit was the central city—its ground is the old lake bed that had surrounded the Aztec island city of Tenochtitlán, drained for expansion long ago but not quite terra firma even now. Most of the collapsed structures were south of the Zócalo, on the poorer side of the city, though one of the worst disasters was the collapse of the huge Nuevo León apartment building at Tlaltelolco in the north. It tipped over on its side like a grounded ship beached in its own rubble, once-horizontal floors tilted to the sky. Nearly five hundred people died inside it. Also collapsed were the central telephone exchange downtown, through which most of the city’s phone calls were routed, the communications tower of the Televisa television station, two large hospitals, several downtown hotels, the buildings housing the ministries of labor, communications, commerce, and the navy, and many large apartment buildings. Ham radio operators were among the first to get news out to the world. Several hundred buildings were destroyed, more than two thousand irreparably damaged, and countless thousands more somewhat damaged. Though the percentage of buildings damaged was small—Mexico City was one of the world’s largest cities—what was lost was central, literally and figuratively, for the administrative, commercial, communication, and transportation systems of the region and the nation.

A cloud of dust rose up to coat everything in pallor and choke those who moved through the ravaged streets. Eight hundred thousand people had almost instantly become homeless, at least temporarily. Estimates of the dead range from ten to twenty thousand, though many were not yet dead, just trapped and maimed by the collapse. Some would cry out for aid for days. Some would be rescued from ruins quickly or after volunteers tunneled for days through unstable heaps in which the smell of those who did not survive became terrible in the warm September air. A maternity ward collapsed, and twenty-two babies were eventually extracted from the heap it became. Eight infants were rescued from the ruins days after the government had ordered the collapsed structure bulldozed.