In a perfect community, responses to massive natural disasters would be rational, authoritative, and orderly. There would be a thought-out emergency plan authorized by the top of the chain-of-command; people would act according to the plan; the plan would work. In the communities we live in, though, responses to emergency are often cultural, determined by a people's mentality and habits rather than a plan's logic. And they are chaotic, numerous seemingly random acts by people paying little attention to authority.
But there's evidence that the cultural and the chaotic are not the enemy of the perfect community response; in fact, they appear to be as essential as top-down planning and centralized control to mounting effective responses to floods, wildfires, and other large-scale disasters. This provides clues about how communities might rethink emergency response. Top-down plans simply cannot anticipate all of the real conditions that will emerge in a mass disaster and they cannot provide enough specific guidance to every person about how to cope with what emerges around them. Similarly, central authorities cannot possibly know everything that is happening as a disaster unfolds and cannot inform every person about what they in particular should do.
New thinking about how to blend top-down control and emergent chaos in community's disaster responses would be just in the nick of time, too, since it's widely predicted that climate change will bring more natural disasters. It's "a very safe bet that the number and variety of disasters will rise dramatically in the years to come, as the planet warms." So declares Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist--and he is hardly alone in this prediction. "Indeed," McKibben continues, "a large number of well-informed people are making those bets already. They work for insurance companies and they are increasingly dumping coastal policyholders as bad risks, or raising their premiums sky high. The number of both devastating droughts and floods increases steadily and ominously."
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, local governments everywhere refocused on their emergency plans. More than likely, most of them assumed that they needed better plans that people in their communities would follow; they leaned on a centralized, top-down, command-and-control approach. Anything else, they'd have thought, would result in chaos.
But new thinking about disaster response suggests that within what appears to be chaos there is order--and that it's exactly the sort of response a community needs. The rebuilding of New Orleans provides an example. In the absence of strong central leadership, efforts have "atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects," The Atlantic reports. "An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city's neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan." Michael Mehaffy, head of the Sustasis Foundation, described the apparent chaos:
"If you look at the way ants behave when they're gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you've ever seen--they're zigzagging all over the place, they're bumping into other ants. You think, 'What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything... But [looking at New Orleans] if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it's the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process."
An important aspect of this pattern--the chaos that works--is the focus of McKibben's review of Rebecca Solnit's new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which closely examines what people did during natural disasters from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1989 northern California earthquake to Hurricane Katrina. "What happens? How do people react to chaos?" asks McKibben. Solnit's "answer is strangely and powerfully hopeful... amid the rubble, where people, acting on their own and without direction from the authorities, manage to provide for each other." As Solnit put it: In disasters "most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones."
McKibben sums this pattern as "solidarity is our default setting," arguing hopefully that people have "talent and our hunger for connection, at least in times of stress." He's describing a cultural response to disaster.
In Australia, a national attitude about fighting fires may have contributed to the high death toll last summer. When a community faces fire risk, people are told to pick from two options: leave early or stay and fight the fire. (Unlike other regions prone to wildfire, like California, the Australians do not use mandatory evacuations.) It's popular to choose to stay, because unprotected houses are often burned up and, The New Yorker article reports, "because of a streak of self-reliance in the Australian character." The royal commission is looking into "the extent to which the deaths... were the result not just of the Australian landscape but of an entire mentality."
What would it look like to "plan chaos" as part of disaster response?
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It means developing networks of organizations that coordinate and collaborate in responding to a disaster, based on the combination of a plan and the facts on the ground. After Katrina, the Red Cross realized that it didn't have the capacity within its organization to respond to multiple disasters. Instead of deciding to somehow expand itself in response, it looked to develop networks of other organizations--public, private, and nonprofit--that could act in concert.
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It means decentralizing the production of and access to critical information during a disaster. When information has to flow up the chain of command and then back down the chain, it is slow to reach people who need it. When only a few people can generate and broadcast the information, it is limited and may not be very useful at the very local level. After Katrina, some 911 emergency systems started to look at ways to allow many sources--a regional network of pre-screened people--to provide highly localized information into the system.
Networks and "open" communications systems provide decentralized, localized, and flexible capacities. They are more than mechanisms to build into disaster response; they involve a way of doing things, a culture, that is part of the "solidarity default" that McKibben envisioned. They enable many people/organizations to make decisions based on local conditions and to coordinate with each other in ways that make sense given those conditions. This may look like chaos to anyone who thinks "I'm in charge" is the right response. But it works. |
