Can we head off disasters?

Remember Iben Browning? When today’s biggest news is how we’re supposed to predict, prepare and respond to such natural catastrophes as the earthquake in South Asia and Hurricane Katrina, we should take a moment to recall Browning.

Fifteen years ago, he predicted that on Dec. 3, 1990, an earthquake as powerful as the one that killed tens of thousands in Asia would rock the Midwest. Schools closed, church attendance increased, earthquake insurance sales soared and children were scared out of their minds. “I don’t want to be dead,” one told USA Today. The media gathered.

For those too young to remember, if you think times are goofy now, you should have been there back then.

Browning predicted that tidal forces from the alignment of the Earth, moon and sun would cause an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 to 7.5 on the Richter scale, in the Mississippi Valley along the New Madrid fault. Browning was a biologist, inventor, climatologist and business consultant, but he was no expert on earthquakes. Yet, the public and media ate it up. Pathetically, few scientists disputed Browning, because as one said, “We didn’t want to call attention to him,” thus, irresponsibly contributing to the hysteria.

Still, Browning had some history on his side. The strongest recorded earthquake in American history was not in San Francisco, but the New Madrid series of quakes from late 1811 to early 1812. The largest was estimated at magnitude 8.3, compared with the 7.6 Asian quake. It reversed the Mississippi River’s flow, created a new 20-mile-long lake, swallowed islands and liquefied land into a Jell-O-like consistency. Canadians felt it, and if Chicago had existed then, church bells here would have rung or worse. No one knew how many died in the sparsely settled region.

Imagine a similar quake now. It would be at least as devastating as the Asian quake. The blame throwing would eclipse Hurricane Katrina’s finger pointing. (The complaints about the supposedly indifferent and inadequate government response to the Asian quake are eerily similar to those that followed Katrina, but few, if any, commentators have drawn parallels. Maybe it’s because they can’t blame the quake on the “Bushies.”)

Truth is, not much has been readied for the coming New Madrid quake, and few are making much of it. After the 1990 scare, such quake preparations as bracing Midwest skyscrapers were discussed. But today, no massive stores of rations, rescue crews or emergency shelters are pre-positioned. None will be, because (1) it is human nature to put off such matters and (2) it is financially and physically impossible to do so for this or any combination of predicted natural disasters.

Yet, we want and expect protections against: asteroids and comets; rising sea levels, tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes; weapons of mass destruction, including terrorist attacks on subways; airplane hijackings; avian flu, swine flu and mad cow disease; HIV/AIDS pandemics and assorted run-of-the-mill epidemics, contagions and pestilences; global warming; etc. Just two years ago, a SARS epidemic was going to be another Spanish flu outbreak that killed as many as 50 million. Instead, SARS killed 774.

Just after Katrina, the media demanded: “Are we ready for the `Next Big One?'” Meaning, any or all of the above tribulations. Of course, we aren’t; we don’t have enough money, time or people to turn life on Earth into life in a cocoon. Nor should we. What other important things would we have to exchange for certain security?

Truth is, our capacity to plan for natural calamities lags behind the actual dangers. The inherent nature of bureaucracy is not up to providing immediate relief. A more centralized government makes detailed, local planning and execution more difficult. Yet, the evening news feeds us the expectation that we can meet and turn aside every calamity.

I’m not suggesting we succumb to fatalism. We can plan and make incremental improvements in search and rescue, communications and other emergency, life-saving procedures.

Yet, it should be worrisome that our 21st Century expectations have become so high that they are unreal and blind us to our precarious existence. In what may be one of the most critical issues of our time, we have become impossibly reliant on some grand plan to solve all troubles. In doing so, we become less self-reliant. One day, we demand to know why we can’t do a better job of predicting hurricanes; the next why we can’t do a better job predicting earthquakes. It’s enough to give a network anchor a lifetime of work.

———-

Dennis Byrne is a Chicago-area writer and consultant. [email protected]