30 August 2021 — 0621 mdt
Do the survivors of natural disasters panic? No.
Every few summers, an August thunderstorm lights up the sky, rattles my house, and takes down the electrical grid, leaving me without lights, refrigeration, appliances, and my computer. Until Flathead Electric restores my power, my world is limited to what I can see from my front porch, hear on my battery powered radio, or learn from my smartphone, while their batterys last (assuming cell towers are operative). Even a short outage disquiets, taking me back a century.
For survivors of a major hurricane, such as Katrina in 2005, or Ida, which raked the same area yesterday, outages last far longer, impacts on communications are greater, and isolation is much more profound. When radio and smartphone batteries die, the world contracts to what survivors can see from the place where they’ve taken shelter. Those of us on the outside, with access to a glut of news sources, know far more about the disaster than the people at the center of it.
Do the survivors panic? Become helpless with hysteria? No. That’s a trope of disaster movies, and a belief held by public officials who distrust and have contempt for the public. But with very rare exceptions, and contrary to sensationalist reports of looting and shooting, survivors stay calm and work together, sometimes, Rebecca Solnit reports in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, finding in their predicament an unexpected freedom and joy.
Solnit examined the aftermaths of five major modern disasters: (1) the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, (2) the Halifax explosion of 1917, (3) the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, (4) the 9/11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York, and (5) Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Then, in this remarkably insightful book that ought to be required reading for every disaster planner and first responder, she eloquently explains why the conventional wisdom about panic is wrong. Below are extensive excerpts from the book’s concluding chapter. You’ll also want to read Lee Clarke’s Panic: Myth or Reality (PDF).
…Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances [disasters]; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges. Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis. One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild. And it demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making. Citizens themselves in these moments constitute the government—the acting decision-making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered. Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.
Two things matter most about these ephemeral moments. First, they demonstrate what is possible or, perhaps more accurately, latent: the resilience and generosity of those around us and their ability to improvise another kind of society. Second, they demonstrate how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism, and purposefulness. Thus the startling joy in disasters.
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At the end of 2008, a report by the U.S. Army War College proposed that the economic crisis could lead to civil unrest requiring military intervention. Treasury secretary Henry Paulson had himself suggested martial law might be required, and the Phoenix police were themselves preparing to suppress civil unrest, including that provoked by the economic downturn. Even as the Bush administration was fading from the scene, those in power continued to regard the public as the enemy.
Relieving those in charge of their entrenched beliefs will not be easy. Lee Clarke, the coauthor of the definitive essay on elite panic, told me that after 9/11 he found himself at a lot of conferences sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and by FEMA. There he tried to tell the bureaucrats what actually works in disasters. “In a chaotic situation command and control is bound to fail,” he’d say of the top-down management system many organizations deploy in crisis. He told the disaster administrators who wanted to know what message to give people in disaster that it is the people who might have some messages to give them on what’s actually going on and what’s actually needed. Clarke concluded, “They don’t have a way to fold civil society into their official conceptions.”
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Fixing those wrongs and wounds in New Orleans and everywhere else is the work that everyday disaster requires of us. Recognizing the wealth of meaning and love such work provides is the reward everyday disaster invites us to claim. Joy matters too, and that it is found in this most unpromising of circumstances demonstrates again the desires that have survived dreariness and division for so long. The existing system is built on fear of each other and of scarcity, and it has created more scarcity and more to be afraid of. It is mitigated every day by altruism, mutual aid, and solidarity, by the acts of individuals and organizations who are motivated by hope and by love rather than fear. They are akin to a shadow government—another system ready to do more were they voted into power. Disaster votes them in, in a sense, because in an emergency these skills and ties work while fear and divisiveness do not. Disaster reveals what else the world could be like—reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity, and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it’s absent from the stage.♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Disaster sometimes knocks down institutions and structures and suspends private life, leaving a broader view of what lies beyond. The task before us is to recognize the possibilities visible through that gateway and endeavor to bring them into the realm of the everyday.
Given how polarized America has become, do Solnit’s observations still apply? Yes. My immediate neighbor contains die hard Trumpers and progressive Democrats. But when one of us gets his car stuck in a snowdrift, the rest of us set aside political differences to pull him out. Last year, an early June microburst knocked down dozens of trees, taking down the grid for almost 24 hours. Again, we set aside political differences to clear the road and driveways. Humanity transcended politics.
It’s not the survivors of distasters who panic. It political leaders and public officials, especially those who diverted funds from disaster preparedness to pet projects designed to win votes and who, when the winds roar, the earth shakes, the water rises, and the flames advance at frightening speed, are not prepared or equipped to handle the situation, and therefore project their fears and inadequacies upon the public, expecting Joe and Jill Survivor — who are keeping their cool — to be helpless, quavering, cowards who are on the verge of becoming a rampaging mob.