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From research and direct experience, scholars know plenty about disasters—including how to prevent the worst and how to rebuild afterwards. What's less clear is how to be heard. By Laurie Becklund When Ray Seed walked into his introductory soil mechanics class Monday morning, August 29, neither he nor his students had yet heard public reports that levees had been breached and water was pouring into New Orleans. “I stood up and told them that when they got home, they should turn on their television sets because the biggest disaster of our lifetimes would be underway,” said Seed, a civil engineering professor at Berkeley. Seed had been studying those levees and others around the world for years. A month later, he would be asked to lead the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) investigation into their failure. But on that morning, he talked to his undergraduates not just about the levees and how they would fail, but also about the enormous frustrations of being able to foresee, but not forestall, catastrophe. Big hurricanes tend to hit every 200 years, he said, but politicians serve for shorter terms. The lesson: procrastinate long enough, and disaster will hit. That is also the lesson for California, where unstable levees threaten much of the state’s water supply, he said in an interview, pulling out a worn report and launching into a sermon he has been honing at least since 1981, when he began working in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. He speaks fast. If your work involves disasters people don’t want to think about, you have to grab people’s attention when you can. “Roughly once every 200 years — which is stunningly the same number as New Orleans—an earthquake will hit Northern California badly enough that we cannot resume water shipments for a year or more to 18 million Southern Californians,” he said. “The key difference between hurricanes and earthquakes is that with hurricanes you get to roll the dice every year, while earthquakes store energy over time, becoming more likely as time passes.” It has been 99 years since the last major quake, which devastated San Francisco, Seed noted, tracing a rising line on a graph showing that the probability of a major earthquake rises rapidly just after the first century mark. If the chart is accurate, Californians are like surfers blithely paddling out on a placid sea and about to encounter an enormous wall of water within the next 100 years. To disaster experts like Seed, Katrina and Rita illuminate—like spotlights on a timer—the dark landscapes they study. The lines on Seed’s graph could easily have been plotted by a number of colleagues in other Berkeley departments: historians, architects, engineers, environmentalists, business professors, and political scientists, each with his or her own scenario of pending disaster. They, too, live in what many consider the next state of risk: California. They, too, are dependent on patient fault lines and impatient voters. During Katrina’s early days when floodwaters still swamped Louisiana, one federal disaster official turned straight into a CNN camera and made a public appeal for “big brains” to help him figure out how to save herds of cattle starving in pastures of saltwater. Big brains at Berkeley and elsewhere had doubtless already forecast that possibility. They study the past and model for the future. But, in the present tense, which is where disasters unfold, they often find themselves rendered academic by a “real world” more comfortable flying by the seat of its pants. While billions in no-bid contracts were being awarded in the devastated Gulf and jokes circulated that there were so many contractors in New Orleans you could fill Lake Pontchartrain with their rental cars and walk across, “big brains” across the country were banging out proposals to compete for NSF disaster research grants of $25,000 to $35,000. “There’s an ongoing dialogue among many social scientists who do disaster research,” echoed Mary Comerio, professor of architecture and international authority on post-disaster reconstruction. “There is enormous frustration at not being listened to because they feel disaster lessons need to be relearned after every disaster.” So, California Monthly consulted more than a dozen top Berkeley researchers, whose expertise ranges from the law to levees, and listened. Steven Raphael, associate dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, is an economist who examines hot-button social issues—discrimination, perceived criminality, homelessness—through numbers. When observers commented on the numbers of African-Americans who ignored evacuation warnings and connected this population to looting, Raphael thought of it as “a straightforward auto-access question.” He and a colleague at Brookings Institution ran 2000 U.S. Census data to find out why. Except for three cities in the New York metropolitan area, they found that New Orleans had the highest proportion of households without car access among 297 metropolitan areas nationwide, he said. Blacks were far more likely to lack household access to a car than whites—27 percent lacked cars compared to 5 percent of whites—as well as being less likely to have cars than blacks in many other cities. Among the poor, 46 percent lacked car access, versus just 13 percent of poor whites. The most vulnerable populations—children and the elderly—caught by television cameras made up 48 percent of all households without cars. “A lot of what I saw didn’t surprise me much,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of research into transportation as a determinant of poverty, mostly pertaining to finding a job.” An old London cartoon on the door of Robert Cervero’s Wurster Hall office shows triple-decker buses and passengers who are tall and thin. Its caption reads: “Some Suggestions for Doubling Available Road Space.” A transportation and land use expert, Cervero chairs the Department of City and Regional Planning at the College of Environmental Design. Housed in a multi-story cement building considered so ugly by many of its inhabitants that some suspect undue influence from Stanford architects, it was the first of Berkeley’s schools to be closed for earthquake retrofitting. Yet, its plywood walls are stapled with plans and announcements, and a single magazine shelf in its library holding titles such as Urban Morphology, Texas Architect, Urban Geography, and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements serves as a reminder that cities grow organically—there is no such thing as a blank slate. Cervero has consulted on strategic planning issues worldwide, including recently, in Indonesia. But, when he considers issues involved in rebuilding New Orleans, he thinks of Bogota, Colombia, where a series of progressive mayors has developed a network of modern bus centers, green belts, and ciclovias that ban traffic on Sundays. In a capital better known for drug trafficking, bicycling has soared by 800 percent, sales to local merchants have increased with foot traffic, and voters have approved measures to move the city toward car-free traffic. The changes were enabled partly by a “value capture” strategy that encouraged poor hillside squatters—who lacked public services and sometimes paid a fourth of their wages to get to work—to move into modern urban housing near public transportation centers while developers created subdivisions in the hillsides, Cervero said. A strong believer in financial risk versus reward modeling, he worries. Will New Orleans fall into an expensive “determinist trap” of laying sewer lines and freeways while skipping the essential step of getting input first from all residents, including those forced to flee? Will tax-payers in other cities, including San Francisco, see rebuilding New Orleans as in their best interests if their investment ultimately takes away their own con-vention business? Will short-term real estate interests determine the footprint of New Orleans before a reasonable debate can even be held? “If levels of unemployment and racial strains are as high as they are now in five years,” he said, “I assume we will have blown it.” Natural disasters have a way of ripping off political and social veneers. For history professor Mark Healey, the televised anguish of Katrina—the in-your-face class differences, the anger over official responses, the people forced out in the name of saving them—illustrated phenomena he’s read and written about before. “What’s interesting to me is how these disasters function as crucibles for remaking citizenships, legitimacy, and authority,” said Healey. “Long-term consequences come from decisions made on the fly.” The son of a missionary family who spent part of his youth in Argentina, Healey is writing a book called The Ruins of the New Argentina that looks at a 1944 earthquake that killed some 10,000 people in the wine-growing region of San Juan. While wealthy vintners called for restitution and army troops to restore order, an ambitious young Juan Peron was photographed embracing many of the estimated 100,000 homeless poor. Rail lines were cleared, tens of thousands of people were evacuated, and emergency housing created new neighborhoods. It was at a disaster relief event that Peron met his future wife, the glamorous Evita. Peronismo lasted 60 years. Similarly, after a hurricane that leveled the capital of Santo Domingo in 1930, Rafael Trujillo built a repressive regime in the Dominican Republic that lasted until his assassination 31 years later. “You often find that a shift to a more powerful interventionist state was directly connected to natural disaster,” Healey said. Yet, when Managua was devastated after a 1972 earthquake, much of the international aid was channeled through sweetheart contracts with cronies and family members of dictator Anastasio Somoza, alienating the middle and upper classes and helping precipitate the Nicaraguan Revolution, he said. In Mexico City, the massive 1985 earthquake that may have killed as many as 30,000 people quite literally unearthed proof of the corruption of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had controlled Mexico for most of the 20th century. In the vast rubble, bodies showing signs of torture were exposed in police stations. Newer buildings collapsed, indicating officials had taken bribes to permit construction in violation of building codes. Factories pancaked, trapping workers and exposing illegal labor practices. Official agencies responded poorly in the aftermath, but out of their failure heroes emerged, ultimately helping empower civic organizations that became a point of national pride. PRI hardliners gave way to more progressive members, and ultimately competitive elections were held that cost PRI the presidency for the first time since the Mexican Revolution. “Hurricane Katrina clearly created a moment when you hope you could think big,” Healey said. “Harness emerging civic energies, re-envision the city, a new economy, listen to people who have been so ignored." Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture whose expertise includes public policy, seismic planning, and finance, is the author of a book, When Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery. She has undertaken research missions to disaster sites around the world, helped develop building codes that saved parts of affordable housing in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and helped oversee Berkeley’s own campus seismic retrofitting. When she looks at disasters, she looks at insurance incentives and lost tax bases as well as lost hosting revenue. Interviewed extensively in the news media following Katrina, she is doubtless Berkeley’s highest profile disaster expert. “We should let the private market work and not restrain it, let the people do what they want with their property,” she said. “And, yet, we should target public assistance to the truly needy of society—affordable housing.” Asked for models, she mentioned the mix of community pressures and private and public investment that rebuilt San Francisco’s waterfront after the collapse of the Embarcadero Freeway. “I’m very much a pluralist—the more designers the better,” she said, citing Mexico’s decision after the 1985 earthquake to set up a single agency that replaced a few hundred destroyed housing units by developing basic floor plans, hiring hundreds of different architects to adapt plans to neighborhoods around the city, and then going out of business itself. “It was absolutely brilliant,” she said. “It re-created the richness of an urban environment." As executive director of the Boalt Hall East Bay Community Law Center, Jeff Selbin runs a teaching clinic that is also Alameda County’s largest legal services program. He said his earliest childhood memory is of huddling in a doorway against Hurricane Betsy in his native Baton Rouge. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of evacuees from his home state—at least 1,300 families from the South—had found their way to Oakland, according to Selbin. Many were poor African-Americans who moved in with existing clients descended from an earlier wave of migrants who had come West seeking living wages at the then-developing Port of Oakland. He said he was confident his staff would help grandparents raising grandchildren without custody papers and tenants whose landlords back home were threatening to sell their belongings if they didn’t pay rent on apartments in mandatory evacuation zones. Just a few months before he started working at the agency, in 1989, a coalition of Bay Area legal aid attorneys had sued FEMA over a controversial “shared housing rule” that denied FEMA benefits to victims of the Loma Prieta earthquake living in overcrowded East Bay apartments while providing benefits to, say, homeowners in San Francisco’s more affluent Marina neighborhood. He literally dusted off the old documents and a guidebook lawyers developed for other lawyers back then, and contributed them to an information bank now being developed by a dozen of the nation’s top legal services attorneys considering new legal action against FEMA. (Because their clients couldn’t afford to wait back then, they had settled for $23 million to help underwrite emergency housing and other expenses. But, they had no legal precedent.) By the time their houses are rebuilt in two years, will they (the evacuees) return?” asks Michael O’Hare, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy who is skeptical of reports New Orleans is going to be rebuilt into a high-tech, job-rich center. “What kinds of jobs are going to draw them back? You don’t get Silicon Valley because you lay new cable in the streets. You get it because you’ve been putting knowledge in people’s heads for 25 years.” O’Hare, whose favorite class to teach deals with arts and cultural policy, suspects that the public has yet to realize that New Orleans’ most valuable asset, its “social and cultural web,” has been destroyed, leading to the risk of a costly Dixieland-like Disneyland facade. “Among the most mendacious slogans I’ve ever heard is Bush’s promise to rebuild New Orleans with federal funds,” he said. “Are there taxpayers on another planet I don’t know about?” What he recommends, what he yearns for, is a public discourse that lays the issues out cleanly into three separate questions. First, would it have been a good expenditure of funds to strengthen the levee system to protect New Orleans before the storm? (His own answer: yes, probably.) Second, should the city be rebuilt? (No, probably not, though he doesn’t mean razing it, either.) Third, if you do spend money to restore and protect New Orleans, what will you get? To him, an underlying problem skews logical debate—he paused to find a name for it and finally came up with “American wishful thinking-ness.” No elected official of any party has convinced voters of the importance of paying for solutions that build in the possibility of failure, he said; that it is possible to lose Iraq, that devastating earthquakes will strike California. “Where is the leader who will stand up and tell us we can’t go shopping forever?” he asked. “There is no rule that says the grown-ups are in charge and eventually they’ll fix things for us.” How could we have been so ill prepared? In an era of just-in-time floral deliveries, why hadn’t the Superdome been stocked with supplies before disaster struck? Why were millions spent on ice trucks that were stopped at city limits and sent away as flood victims suffered in the heat? Why did donated clothing get bulldozed with storm debris in Mississippi while evacuees in Houston wore clothing caked with canal muck because there were no washing machines? Organizational liquefaction? “An interesting way to put it,” said Karlene Roberts, professor emeritus and research psychologist in the Haas School of Business. Together with two colleagues, Roberts developed the concept of “high-reliability organizations.” Their work focuses on identifying common traits of hazardous technological systems, like air control towers, that operate with few mistakes. She has written dozens of papers, developed management tools that help forecast disaster readiness, and is an expert in organizational behaviors of institutions ranging from hospitals to space shuttles. Her research has been applied by the U.S. Navy, the FAA, British Petroleum, NASA, and international bankers. But even Roberts confessed she was having difficulty getting her “arms around” the challenges posed by Katrina. “People ask, what should we pay attention to first? And we really don’t know. It’s a morass.” She stressed that her research has focused on successful models, not failed ones. Institutions, it appears, aren’t anxious to open their doors to researchers determined to publish their mistakes.) Established “incident command system” procedures that trigger increasingly complex emergency responses appeared not to have been invoked in New Orleans, she said. Yet, strict chain-of-command can exacerbate disaster, she said, citing research she conducted on aircraft carriers in which crashes at sea have been almost eliminated due to constant training in which even crewmen are trusted to abort potentially dangerous landings without waiting for orders. “When a nuclear ship is in port, that’s when you follow chain of command,” she said. “But, in the field, in an emergency, you know you need to be able to trust your people.” When Nicholas Sitar was a boy in the early 1960s in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, a storm ripped a major break in a levee along the Danube, causing significant flooding and substantial damage. As water poured in, he watched barges filled with rock being floated in and sunk with explosives to fill the breach. Hundreds of trucks were lined up behind them, timed to dump additional rock on top of the barges. Officials running the operation were under pressure to perform or lose their jobs. Yet, at other times, that same fear of reprisal could grind operations to a standstill. Sitar knows these things because his father was in charge of levees for the communist government agency that regulated the navigable portions of the river between the Hungarian and Austrian borders. Sitar directs Berkeley’s Earthquake Engineering Research Center, which supports multidisciplinary research into earthquake engineering. He chaired the university’s campus seismic review that Mary Comerio helped set in motion. A geotechnical engineer, he conducts research into how wireless sensors can be used in wildfire management with the support of the National Science Foundation. The technology is similar to gadgets parents sometimes plant on their teenagers’ cars or the accelerometers that deploy air bags. Sitar wonders whether the damage from Hurricane Katrina might have been mitigated by small sensors, less expensive and more flexible than existing stationary instrumentation. Could sensors placed on levees have identified sites of the breaks even as they were occurring? Could they have heightened what first responders call “situational awareness” by ecreasing the time it took to put people together with their resources? Because the devices can communicate with each other, he said, they make plausible the concept of “self-organizing networks.” But, in the end, fallible human beings make up the system. Remembering pressure put on his father, he also wondered if delays responding to Katrina might have been caused by officials afraid of making a misstep and losing their jobs? “It’s always easier responding to someone else’s disaster,” he said, checking himself. “The real question is how you respond to your own.” California’s own disaster in waiting, engineers and environmentalists have been saying for yars, may well be in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a network of 60 islands and peninsula-like tracts through which flows two-thirds of California’s fresh water, including most of Southern California’s drinking supply. The islands are protected by levees built by shovel as Gold Rush fever subsided and agricultural interests converted the fertile Delta soil to crops. Organic matter in the tilled fields predictably compacted or burned away in the sun and the islands, like the city of New Orleans, began sinking. Over the decades, bulldozers and other methods were used to build on the original unengineered bases. Today, the Delta, spanning an area nearly six times larger than New Orleans, is protected by 1,100 miles of levees so fragile that some measure 1.1 on a stability scale, 1.0 basically being a landslide. Some of the original islands are 20 feet below sea level—enormous fragile earthen bowls. Ray Seed said that when he set out on his career years ago, he identified five potential seismic disasters he wanted to help avoid. Of these, he figures he has contributed to two successes so far: Egypt’s Aswan Dam, seismically strengthened to avoid wiping out millions of Egyptians along its banks below; and improving California building codes to require engineers to address issues of soil liquefaction and seismic landslides in “special study zones.” (“We don’t call them ‘hazard’ zones.”) A third potential disaster is Istanbul, Turkey, a city of unreinforced concrete on “the Old Faithful of fault lines” that he sees as a lost cause unless its government addresses the problem. (“One of my great fears,” he said, “is of returning to Istanbul and finding a million people dead.”) The fourth is—or was—New Orleans. “Too late there,” he said, before leaving for New Orleans to investigate the levees and their emergency repairs. (“Politicians under-respond to preparedness and over-respond to disaster,” he noted. “I think we’re likely to get a very schmanzy levee system in New Orleans.”) The fifth potential seismic disaster: the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. “Because it boggles minds, there is no comprehensive plan for dealing with worst-case seismic scenarios,” Seed said. Unable to muster the political capital and funds to fix the problem, elected officials fund studies instead. Then, funding dries up until a tremor or storm triggers a reminder, and new studies are commissioned and the cycle starts over. Pointing to news reports of $100 million in damage caused by levee failures in June 2004 after routine maintenance budgets were slashed, he said the dynamic is as expensive as it is ineffective. Yet, if there was any point he wanted to make, it was that not even millions in new maintenance funding will be sufficient to avoid the statewide disaster he sees in his mind’s eye when another major quake strikes the Bay Area. With thousands of victims trapped under rubble, with hospitals collapsing and fires to fight, who will commit emergency resources to stanch saltwater pouring into inland channels miles away that lead to Los Angeles and San Diego? Even with rationing, emergency supplies from, say, the Colorado River, and severe cutbacks on farm irrigation, Southern California’s water supply would not likely last long enough to restore today’s water system. More likely, he said, some sort of emergency trench might be zippered through California’s middle that would be illegal under current laws: an “environmental Armageddon.” Predicting renewed North-South battles reminiscent of the fractious Peripheral Canal initiative that California voters ultimately turned down, Seed is hoping Katrina will swing the door open to major public policy debate and a swing back toward civil engineers. (“Mechanical engineers get paid to make weapons; civil engineers get paid to make targets.”) Meanwhile, he said, “It seems irresponsible not to stockpile rock. Big rocks, smaller rocks—the rate at which they can be acquired is limited. And, we should be contracting with barge companies now, paying a fee to put language in all their contracts that they would have to interrupt their work to come to the Delta in an emergency.” Of course, that may be too late for the people already living there, says G. Mathias Kondolf, associate professor of landscape architecture and geography. Kondolf, who serves as an environmental adviser to the Army Corps of Engineers, studies rivers as they pertain to salmon, gravel mines, dams, sediment, and other natural and man-made phenomena. Typically, first settlers build their homes and businesses on natural sand berms, then build levees to protect their investments, he said. As they prosper, poorer workers begin moving into back swamp areas, as was the case in New Orleans. “There’s not a perfect correlation of vulnerability to flooding to income, but there’s a lot,” he said. After Katrina, California’s State Reclamation Board decided to review local governments’ plans to build in flood plains much in the way the California Coastal Commission reviews building plans along the ocean. But, the board had rarely exercised power over local planning decisions. Board members serve at the pleasure of the governor, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fired the entire board a month later, raising public debate over whether the move was done at the behest of developers who had supported his campaign. But, the pattern of building in flood zones began long ago, and memories are short. In Stockton, thousands of new housing units have been built in plains that have flooded so predictably for so long that the hometown baseball team that inspired the 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat’’ was called the “Mudville 9.” In Yuba County officials recently announced plans to permit hundreds of new housing units along a strip of the Feather River that had flooded in 1997, killing four people after a levee burst. The State of California, acknowledging liability for failure to properly maintain the levees, settled $45 million in damages. When Kondolf does a mental scan of the California Delta in the wake of a major earthquake, he imagines whole regions where people are drowned or are stranded on rooftops, never realizing they were in danger because elected officials had ignored the danger or ordered levee construction that only appeared to protect the families moving in behind them. There are no easy solutions, he said; houses built in low-lying levee areas should be put on stilts as long-term options to re-plumb California are considered. One promising new technology might be to raise the islands inside the levees by pumping material dredged from the San Francisco Bay under the surface of the sinking terrain—a kind of massive environmental Botox injection. “No matter how much you spend on levees, there can be a storm big enough that they will fail,” he said. “I think the first principle is that, morally, we should not be putting people in harm’s way.” Laurie Becklund shared a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and received the Latin American Studies Association award for outstanding journalism for her reporting on Salvadoran death squads. She has co-authored three books, including: SWOOSH, The Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There, and Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny, which was published by Gotham Books in October. She has appeared as a guest on Today, CBS Radio, NBC Nightly News, National Public Radio, and Primetime. |
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