The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (3 page)

For an event to qualify as a disaster, the number of deaths does not need to be large relative to other causes of death. Globally, more people commit suicide and harm themselves in suicide attempts than die or are injured in natural disasters. Suicides almost always happen one at a time and are, for the most part, carried out in private, so they don't draw a lot of attention unless the victim is a celebrity, a well-known political figure or similarly prominent person, or, most distressingly, a young, distraught college student. There are many causes of death that, aggregated globally, far exceed natural disaster deaths. As of 2014 in the United States, influenza takes around 36,000 lives each year, also one by one. Those cases, though relatively small in number, have sometimes triggered forced quarantining and massive
searches for anyone who might have come into contact with the victims. Thousands have died in West Africa from the Ebola virus, but it raised little concern in the United States until it appeared
in
the United States, because we simply didn't expect it. We read of the deaths in West Africa, and although most of us were distressed by the numbers, we tended to think that the virus belonged in Africa, so we somehow felt those deaths, though tragic and disastrous, were expected for that continent. But when two people in the United States caught the virus, it became a front-page news disaster. It was even suggested that all flights from West Africa be banned from landing in the United States.

Nor is there a minimum extent of damage that has to occur before an event is declared a disaster. Disasters are worse as urban phenomena because people and assets are concentrated in a city, but does a whole city have to be flattened? It would be very hard to determine a minimum damage level for an event to qualify as a disaster, and the level must be relative also. The market value of a poor person's home may be almost nothing, but its loss would be consequential to the person. When disasters are ranked by “economic” losses, those in poor countries often come out on the lower end of the scale because they appear to be low-loss events, when in fact they are high-consequence events for those affected.

All true natural disasters can be analyzed in three phases. The phases are common to earthquakes, cyclones, and floods, regardless of whether they happen in rich countries or in poor ones, how many die, or how much the economy suffers. Even so-called manmade or industrial disasters, such as the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, can have these phases, as can social disasters, such as a school shooting. A trivial personal “disaster”—an embarrassingly bad haircut—doesn't exhibit these phases.

The important thing is to recognize that disasters are processes, not single events, as they are usually considered. The event—the quake, the storm, the flood—is the second of the three phases. Although our System 1 thinking tempts us to believe that this is the phase that matters most, it is, in fact, the least important.

The first phase takes place before the event occurs. It's the time when societies should be preparing for disasters that will surely come, but typically they do not prepare or do not prepare adequately enough to avoid costly damages and multiple deaths. By analogy, this is the phase when the oil rig operator should have been more careful or the school system or health system or someone should have identified the isolated, troubled youth who later ended so many lives. There are scholars who study this phase and try to measure social vulnerability—the variable likelihood that societies will suffer from disasters, by how much, and the factors that might determine the disasters' impact.

The second phase is the event itself. Although a flood and an earthquake and an oil rig explosion are quite different, each event is characterized by media coverage that is similarly intense and frenzied, sometimes ghoulish. The second phase actually has two parts to it, both media driven. In the first part, the media covers the spectacle of the disaster: the damage, the heroic efforts of first responders, the tragedy of people trapped in collapsed buildings or buried in rubble or stranded on rooftops. But that becomes repetitive fairly quickly, and in the second part of this phase, the media switches its attention from chronicling a terrible mishap to investigating the inevitable claims of antisocial behavior, like looting and rape, or failures on the part of agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the local police, and government officials or autocratic rulers. If blame can be assigned, the media will assign it. More often than not, it is the media that first designates
an event to be a disaster. It's in this second phase that the effect disasters have on societies—they kill people and destroy property—is most blatantly on display.

The third phase, which is talked about the least, is what happens after the disaster, in the weeks, months, and years after the storm has passed and the floodwaters have receded. The media has packed up and left. Losses have been tallied, the death toll has been estimated. It is the period of time when individuals try to get back on their feet and societies try to function in some semblance of the way they did before the disaster. Here is where we find BP at fault for the oil rig explosion and seek damages. Here is where more stringent gun laws are discussed. No one has a formula for how to recover quickly, effectively, or completely. Some societies succeed very well and might even prosper from the experience; some don't. Just as there are scholars of vulnerability, there are scholars who examine societies for their resilience—their ability to withstand disaster events and recover quickly. Vulnerability and resilience are more or less opposites and have become the lingua franca of many disaster studies.

The media has a passing interest in the first phase, especially if the disaster points up some lack of preparation that might be scandalous—failure to maintain levees, say. The media has almost no interest, or merely a rapidly dwindling one, in the third phase, except perhaps to return to the scene of the disaster on anniversary dates to see how things have improved (or, more likely, to show that things have not improved as fast as they should have). But even that runs out of steam after a while. What happens in phase 3 is largely out of sight. Phases 1 and 3 can be quite long and uninteresting. Phase 2 is typically short, exciting, and terrifying. Droughts can be prolonged, but the transition from drought to famine can be very rapid. Phase 2 makes for the best media stories.

That's not to suggest that the disaster phases are absolutely distinct and separable. Lack of preparation in phase 1 will make phase 2 of a disaster worse than it need be. Failure to reassemble societies in phase 3, after a disaster, will make the societies more likely to experience other disasters, just as failing to build a strong postconflict peace can actually induce a new conflict. Phase 1 can even been seen as the tail end of phase 3—the period after one disaster becomes the period before the next.

Very bad things can happen in the second phase. Whole families can be lost, workplaces destroyed, entire villages swept away, hospitals ruined, schools demolished. Here the human tragedy is most evident and social ills are revealed. This is where we hear of murders, looting, and rape. It is where we see that so many of the victims are poor and neglected. This is where the military may be called in to keep peace, not to help victims, and where victims are criminalized.

The physical damage resulting in phase 2 is, at least in principle, simple to restore. People constructed everything in the first place and should know how to replace it. That reconstruction often happens more quickly than might be expected. In restoring damaged structures, we could and should make them stronger if we can;
build back better
is the rallying cry that motivates this objective. It simply means that we should replace old structures with ones that are more resistant and build protective structures (such as seawalls) that might reduce the scale of future damage. That happens, too, but mostly in wealthy countries; the poor have less capacity to do the better building, and, too often, to meet basic needs, they just put things back the way they were as quickly and as best they can with whatever materials are at hand.

Phase 3, I argue, is where social ills are concealed. The media has almost completely lost interest, and what is left is both physical and social damage. While the physical damage can be handled, the social damage cannot so easily be addressed. In fact, the very idea of
social restoration is elusive. You can't bring the dead back to life, but you can certainly build back better when it comes to structures: using bricks and steel beams, et cetera. But can a whole society truly be built back better?

According to newspaper reports, most societies experience long, miserable struggles back to some semblance of their predisaster states and are permanently set back by these events. You would assume that the more often a society is hit, the more often it experiences a setback, and the setbacks accumulate into permanent penalties. But that assumption, too, is a System 1 reaction (to a System 2 problem), and with a little more deliberative thinking, the opposite conclusion can be reached.

The idea that societies suffer losses but get back up and running fairly quickly after crises is controversial, too, as is the notion that societies sometimes profit from disasters. As early as 1896, philosopher John Stuart Mill mused, “What has so often excited wonder, is the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation; the disappearance, in a short time, of all traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war.”
12
Tellingly, Mill writes “what has so often,” as if the “great rapidity” of recovery were common knowledge in the late nineteenth century. His musings applied more to “the ravages of war” than to disasters, but when he says it has “excited wonder,” he is saying that the swiftness of recovery is counterintuitive. System 1 thinking would lead us to imagine that recovery will be long and hard, but in many instances it is not. We need System 2 thinking to understand why.

People readjust to new situations quickly, no matter how dreadful those situations are. The formal term for this is “hedonic adaptation.”
13
It is the idea that people deal with shocks, both positive and negative, and then settle back to their previous state of happiness.
Most people are not vastly happier when they gain wealth or vastly distressed if they suffer a loss—not for long, anyway. This phenomenon echoes an observation attributed to Dostoyevsky that “man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything.”

In
The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us about Life after Loss,
George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University's Teachers College, challenges the common notions that for most people, grief is a long, hard slog to be worked through in well-defined stages and that many people never get over the loss.
14
Most of us are actually fairly good at dealing with tragedy. It seems to be a built-in feature of our psyche, something we must have to keep going.

In
The Natural History of Destruction,
W. G. Sebold writes of how people emerged from the ruins of their shattered homes after the Allied firebombing raids on German cities at the end of World War II and immediately began getting about their lives, straightening what could be straightened, and opening shops and businesses if they could. Banks reopened within a week. Sebold tells of a woman who was sweeping and tidying the entrance to a half-destroyed movie theater, getting ready for the matinee show the day after a bombing raid, though it likely would never take place, given the damage to the theater.
15

The traditional role of natural scientists—climatologists, seismologists, volcanologists, and others—has been to estimate the timing and magnitude of natural extremes or natural hazards, as they are typically called, not the magnitudes of disasters. The difference isn't trivial. If an earthquake at the top end of the geophysical magnitude scale occurred above the Arctic Circle in Siberia, it probably would not kill anyone or damage any structures, so it would not be a disaster of any magnitude. The earthquake that took tens of thousands of
lives in Haiti was far from the top of the magnitude scale, but it was a disaster of massive scale. The magnitude of the physical event does not predict the magnitude of the disaster very well at all.

Hazard
has a formal definition also, of course. Cambridge's online dictionary explains the word as something that is dangerous and
likely
to cause harm. In almost all definitions, the words
danger,
risk,
and
unavoidable
appear. Disasters, in contrast, are thought of as avoidable. A
natural
hazard is one in which the danger is presented by Nature. Almost all definitions have a tone of fatalism. The word for
hazard
in French is
hasard
and has a broader suite of synonyms than in English, including
coincidence
, but the deep sense of the inevitability remains. The unavoidability of a hazard and the avoidability of a disaster are implicit in almost all discussions of natural disasters, in the academic literature and in disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies in UN agencies and within the numerous organizations tasked with disaster mitigation.

With information on hazard distribution, natural scientists also participate in disaster studies by finding ways to estimate natural hazard risk. Using records of past events, they try to map out the regions most likely to experience earthquakes, storms, landslides, and the like. Governments can use this information to make strategic investments in hazard mitigation projects where they will have the most benefit. The World Bank and regional development banks are very interested in this research as well (and have funded hazard assessments) because they often fund mitigation projects or support reconstruction costs following disasters, particularly in poorer countries.