In "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America" (2000), historian Ted Steinberg focuses on the human, social and economic forces that factor into making natural events into disasters. He compiles an historical series of anecdotal evidence supporting the position that natural calamities become disasters because of human choices, such a decisions to allow or subsidize development on flood plains or in active earthquake zones, and to alter the behavior of rivers through dikes and dams.
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Steinberg presents the argument that that official response to natural disaster is "profoundly dysfunctional," both increasing death and destruction and contributing to class and race injustices. He explores the history of how official response to disasters in populated areas works hard to characterize them as “Acts of God” for which no person (especially not the government leaders) could be responsible, and afterwards, encourages the public to forget that it happened. Steinberg characterizes this as pandering to interests of developers and other “boosters” of economic growth and those advocating, building or providing cheap housing in high-risk locations.
He characterizes the effects of this behavior as having a disproportionate effect upon the poor and disenfranchised, depicting modern disaster relief as systematically biased in favor of property owners and developers, to the neglect of renters and occupants of public housing.
As one example, he points to the history of earthquakes in San Francisco. After the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake, commercial interests did not want talk of yet another earthquake to discourage investment in the city. The state would not fund publication of a scientific examination of the event, says Steinberg, and the two-volume study was published because of a grant from the Carnegie Institute. See Lawson, A.C., "The California Earthquake of April 18, 1906: Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission," Carnegie Institution (1908).
Government and commercial interests pushed to depict the damage as solely a result of the big fire, according to Steinberg. Other than publishers and scientists, only the insurance industry took the earthquake seriously, he writes. Some had earthquake exclusions that they invoked, but that did not protect them from paying for the damage due to the fires that spread from house to house. Williamsburgh City Fire Ins. Co. v. Willard, 164 F.404 (9th Cir. 1908).
In a chapter titled "Body Counting," he includes a note about the city called in 1995 by Weatherwise Magazine "the Death Valley of the Gulf Coast," a populous city surrounded by water, mostly below sea level, vulnerable to storm surge and with few escape routes. This city was narrowly missed by a Category 4 hurricane in 1915 that killed 275. Steinberg anticipated current events when he wrote: "A dreaded direct hit by a storm of comparable magnitude would likely turn New Orleans into a huge lake 20 feet deep, with mass death a very real possibility." Steinberg, "Acts of God," p. 75.
Steinberg has particular scorn to heap on the Corps of Engineers, FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program, in one chapter describing Uncle Sam as a “floodplain recidivist.” He looks, for example, at St. Charles, Missouri, which experienced 28 floods in 35 years before the big floods of 1986, with flood crests increasing over time as the Corps raised more and more dams and levees, cutting the river off from the flood plains that help absorb flood waters. He describes how local legislatures pressured FEMA to back off of attempts to require more strict limitations on floodplain development, and how that contributed to the even more catastrophic losses during the Mississippi River Flood of 1993.
In another chapter, he looks at the development boom in luxury hotels on Miami Beach, and the fast fortunes made by those who bought dune and marsh land, leveled and filled it and built high-rise hotels and condos right on the beach. He mentions briefly Supreme Court decisions impacting local attempts to limit development in such areas, including Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 304 S.C. 376, 404 S.E.2d 895 (1991), rev’d 505 U.S. 1003 (1992) and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 317 Ore. 110, 854 P.2d 437 (1993); rev’d 512 U.S. 374 (1994).
Steinberg reports allegations that FEMA was turned into “a dumping ground for political hacks” as early as the Regan and George H.W. Bush administrations, pointing to “Managing the Federal Government: A Decade of Decline,” House Comm. on Government Operations, 102d Cong., 2d sess., 1993, Committee Print, 125. This situation changed, according to the author, when James Lee Witt brought actual disaster management experience to FEMA and shifted it away from protecting the government from nuclear attack and toward protecting the populace from natural disasters.
The effects of Mr. Witt’s subsequent replacement with appointees lacking disaster management experience was highlighted in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s levees and flash-flooded the homes of masses of New Orleans' most vulnerable citizens.
Although this book may stir the sympathetic reader, his viewpoint is admittedly one-sided, so that adding materials with a more analytical approach would help balance the syllabus for a university course on disaster response and public policy. My next candidate to review will be “Paying the Price: The Status and Role of Insurance Against Natural Disasters in the United States,” H. Kunreuther and R. Roth (1998).
Suggestions and comments are welcome to: Doug “at” DougSimpson.com.
Posted by dougsimpson at September 25, 2005 04:52 PM