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We
know that a tornado will bring howling winds and drenching rain, that a
volcanic eruption will blanket the countryside with ash or lava, and that an
earthquake will violently shake the ground. These are some ways in which Mother
Nature unleashes the energy stored in the earth, and we can try to anticipate
and prepare for the results. We can build basements and shelters to
protect us from those tornadic winds, flee from the countryside when the
volcano erupts, and reinforce our infrastructure from the quaking ground. But
we have not always anticipated the chain reactions that these natural disasters
often trigger.
The
tornadic winds in Moore, Okla., last week and in Joplin, Mo., only two years
ago killed many victims by blunt force trauma, but people also died from less
direct causes. In Moore, it appears that at least six children, who should have
been safe in a basement, died from asphyxiation when water, possibly from
broken pipes, flooded to the low point where they were sheltered. Several
people in Joplin died from a rare and difficult-to-treat fungal infection
called zygomycosis. It turns out that people who have sustained massive
traumatic injuries become so stressed that their immune systems find it
difficult to fight off infections, paving the way for pathogens to enter the
body and thrive. It took teams of experts from the local, state and federal
level to figure out that the people who were displaying these symptoms had been
impaled during the tornado by projectiles containing soil, and that the
infections arose from a fungus in the soil.
In
the harbor of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, much of the damage from the 2010 earthquake was not
from direct shaking, but from the fact that the solid ground supporting the
wharfs turned to mush during the quake, a process known as liquefaction. This,
in turn, closed the harbor to rescue efforts to bring aid into the area. The
same process caused multistory buildings in San Francisco
to sink up to their second or third floors in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
And
in the classic historic example of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Laki,
in 1783, the tens of thousands of people who died as a result were mainly the
victims of famine. Although the eruption was relatively small (a 6 on a
volcanic scale of 8), the volcano spewed out around 8 million tons of hydrogen
fluoride and 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide over an eight-month period.
Half the cattle, 80% of the sheep and 20% of the people of Iceland died in the
event now known as the “Mist Hardships.” The sulfurous clouds spread across
Europe and around the world, weather patterns changed, crops failed and the
deadly famines developed.
If
we want to improve our odds of surviving disaster, we need to do two things.
First, we need to be prepared for the rarest, biggest events. Currently
we invest in infrastructure to protect us from the smaller events — be
they tornados, eruptions, earthquakes or even small tsunamis
that can be shut out by common storm wave barriers on exposed coastlines. But,
we rarely have made the costly investments necessary to protect us from the rare,
but truly devastating, big events.
Second,
we need to learn much more about the secondary reactions and raise more
awareness that it’s not just the primary disaster we have to anticipate. In
order to enhance public safety, civic leaders and emergency responders as well
as members of the general public must understand the links in the chain.
By improving our emergency-response system and educating the public so
that people are willing to support such efforts, we can greatly improve our
readiness for the next inevitable outburst of Mother Nature.
Kieffer
is a professor emerita of geology and physics at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author
of the forthcoming book Dynamics of Disaster and writes regularly on her
blog Geology in Motion.
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