Plurk paste

The Mirrors We Elect
WINDY PANHANDLE Even though there are plenty of rocket scientists in Florida, it did not take one to figure out that something was wrong with the state’s building code in 1992. With sustained winds of 140 mph and gusts up to 165 mph, Hurricane Andrew damaged more than one hundred twenty-five thousand buildings when it blew across Miami-Dade County (not counting the mobile homes that were utterly destroyed in its path).1 The devastation it left behind was the signal many needed to finally recognize that the building code in effect at the time needed a serious overhaul of its design wind speed, which is the value used to determine the wind pressure that buildings must be designed to resist, by law.
So legislators worked steadfastly—albeit slowly, as always— to update the Florida building code, which, like all building codes, sets the minimum standards for construction— nothing less, nothing more. When it was finally adopted by the Legislature in 2000, and came into effect in 2002, sustained wind speed to be considered in the design of buildings on the shore and some distance inland ranged from 120 to 150 mph, with the higher values used in South Florida (which was still recovering from Hurricane Andrew at the time).2 The new design wind speeds became the benchmark across Florida.
Except in parts of Florida’s Panhandle.3 Following 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which wrecked multiple buildings across the Panhandle and obliterated the beachfront community of Mexico Beach, journalists—as always—started looking for someone to blame for this disaster. That is when they remembered Charles W. Clary III, the first architect ever elected as a Florida state senator.
4 Senator Clary was the founding principal of a respectable architectural firm5 whose portfolio includes multiple educational facilities (kindergarten to college), civil and community projects, recreational projects, office buildings, and various resorts such as the Waterside Village at Mexico Beach, Florida.6 He had received multiple awards for his architectural works and civil service. That was apparently of little interest to reporters; it was Clary the politician that was in their sights. On October 16, 2018, the Miami Herald presented him as the architect and convincing advocate of an amendment to the 2000 legislature bill that exempted all new construction in Florida’s Panhandle and located a mile or more from the beach from having to comply with the requirement that storm shutters or impact windows be used7 (unless windows were considered broken by debris and treated as openings, producing an impractical wind design challenge).8 The argument supporting the exemption was that the Panhandle region is densely covered by trees that serve as a buffer that attenuates the higher velocities that would otherwise be felt.9 Given that the community of Mexico Beach is not inland but rather—not a surprise—right on the beach, it is not clear why the Herald singled out this issue, except maybe to support the statement it made earlier in the article that, for years, local politicians wielded the probabilistic assessments of engineers and scientists (based on the limited data set of past hurricane occurrences) “to successfully water down or stave off the local application of stricter windstorm codes” compared to the rest of the state.
Whether it was accurate reporting or not is irrelevant here, because it misses the point of what the true role of politicians in disaster mitigation is. Appreciating this role first requires briefly reviewing what makes a politician tick.
NEEDED, CREATED, AND CONVENIENT DELEGATION OF RESPONSIBILITY Much could be said as to whether there is a better model of government when it comes to preventing disasters. The list of existing political systems is long and full of nuances. For those who have never seen it before, the “Parable of the Isms,” dating back to at least 1935 and loosely attributed to various uncertain origins, modified and enhanced by many others since, summarizes the philosophy at the core of most forms of government. It goes somewhat like this (alleged origin in parentheses below):10
Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk (Anonymous).
Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor (Silas Strawn, 1935).
Communism: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then gives you some milk (Silas Strawn, 1935).
Fascism: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then sells you some milk (Silas Strawn, 1935).
Militarism: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you (Anonymous).
Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull (Silas Strawn, 1935). Then put both of them in your wife’s name and declare bankruptcy (Pat Paulsen, 1968).
Nazism (dictatorship): You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you (Silas Strawn, 1935).
New Dealism: You have two cows. The Government takes both, shoots one, milks the other, then pours the milk down the drain (Silas Strawn, 1935).
Totalitarianism: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned (Anonymous).
American democracy: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures.
The press dubs the affair “Cowgate” (Anonymous).
Russian capitalism: You have two cows. You drink some vodka and count them again. You have five cows. The Russian Mafia shows up and takes however many cows you have (Anonymous).
Greek capitalism: You have two cows. You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds. You still only have two cows (Anonymous).
Japanese capitalism: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide (Anonymous).
Chinese capitalism: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity. You arrest and make disappear the news reporter who suggested this might not be true (Anonymous).
Marketing: Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of two thousand millicows (Anonymous). And the list goes on and on (and it gets crazier11 and crazier12).
In truth, no political system has proved to be better at preventing and managing disasters, and most of them have a horrible record in this regard (or a worse than horrible record). For expediency, the focus here will be on democracies because, per the quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” By definition, a democracy is a societal framework in which the population is sovereign in its ability to decide what is best for the collective benefit of the group, and does so by using elections to appoint members of a government to implement this supreme power that is vested in the people. In other words, democracy is a process by which citizens who are too busy trying to make a living and enjoy life choose to delegate the boring day-to-day operations of government to individuals whom they believe share their values, to ensure that these values will be steering all governmental decisions in the absolute best direction.
Evidently, beyond “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” nobody can agree on anything. There are almost as many different top priorities and values as there are citizens, and no absolute best direction. Therefore, those seeking an elected political office must become masters of deception to convince everybody that they support all of these values at the same time, even when they totally contradict each other.
It is therefore not surprising that some of those most successful at being elected include individuals willing to do just about anything for money. The Italians, who brilliantly recognized that this is possibly the ultimate defining quality of a politician—and must have a great sense of humor— elected a porn star (Ilona Staller) to the Italian parliament in 1987.13 When Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator known as “The Butcher of Baghdad,”14 invaded his peaceful but oil-rich Kuwait neighbor in 1990, the Italian Parliament had a hard time deciding whether it should join the coalition of nations that was gearing up for what became known as the Gulf War to free Kuwait. However, pragmatic Parliament deputy Ilona Staller built on her practical knowledge of what drives frustrated, powerful men to war, and offered to have sex with Saddam in return for world peace. She repeated her offer at the onset of the Second Gulf War in 2002, extending the offer to both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. None of these offers were accepted and both wars unfortunately happened, but the history books will be able to report that it was not for lack of trying to achieve world peace.15 Democracies always get the politicians they deserve.
To put it mildly, there is a reason why politicians have been the butt of jokes since time immemorial. President Ronald Reagan once said that politics is the second-oldest profession, but that it “bears a striking resemblance to the first.” Or, as speech writer Paul Begala (who also served as a strategist for the Clinton-Gore ticket) said, and was later made popular by Jay Leno in the 1990s,16 “Politics is show business for ugly people”—an analogy with acting that could not be more on the nose for those who recite scripted speeches anytime a spotlight hits them, regardless of whether or not they believe the message. Furthermore, among all politicians, those who are the puppets of large corporations, who are willing to kiss as many asses as needed to move up, who have no scruples about spending like sailors on shore leave when it can be charged to an expense account, who have no principles while pretending to be flag bearers of the highest moral values, whose every calculated action is self-benefiting and self-promoting— when they are not outright corrupt, pathological liars, or Machiavellian sociopaths—by no means help the image of the profession. After all, Frank Underwood (in the House of Cards series) was not created in a vacuum. To top it off, in this new millennium’s climate of aggressive political divisiveness, where civility has gone out the windows, things are not getting better; putting in print the latest quotes from some politicians is definitely not good etiquette—and might even be insulting to the English language.
Studies that cast a positive light on the character of politicians are few and far between, given that the first words that apparently come to people’s mind when thinking of politicians are scum bags and crooks.
17 On the positive side, personality tests18 and other analyses have shown that politicians are more agreeable, charming, fearless, confident, and extraverted, but less open to new experiences, than the average person.19 Whether any of these traits can be considered good qualities depends very much on context. Less flattering are psychological profiles demonstrating that politicians are narcissists20 driven by power and money and the prestige, status, and authority that comes with it.21 Not to forget that all the above is only talking about “regular” politicians, not the Machiavellian, authoritarian, paranoid, or totalitarian ones.22 What is important here, though, is that politicians in democracies must be elected. As a result, they must be masterly skillful at saying what needs to be said to reach this goal. They may resort to doublespeak to escape difficult situations, but it nonetheless remains that they must advocate some political platform to get votes—even if they must create ambiguity to convince groups entrenched in two opposite positions that they are the best candidate to get their votes and defend both of these incompatible beliefs.
Therefore, when the population is in unanimous agreement on a given topic, a good politician will seize the occasion. Likewise, when the population could not care less about a given issue, no politician will waste time talking about it. Hence, political platforms are tailored to resonate with the population’s list of priorities and emotions. It is that simple—and disappointing too.
Yet when things go wrong and roofs start flying off during a hurricane, or buildings collapse during an earthquake, or water reaches roof level in entire neighborhoods, pointing fingers at politicians happens. It is scapegoating at its best.
“Why was nothing done by the legislature to prevent this disaster?” “What have X and Y waited for before acting?” “Who is responsible for this debacle?” Always looking for a story, the press will broadcast it all, playing it up with bold headers, often confusing opinions and facts—or expediently focusing on opinions without bothering with facts if under a tight deadline or lax editorial policies.
However, the truth of the matter is that politicians are nothing but mirrors. If nobody cares about hurricanes, or if all have convinced themselves that there is no problem, why would any politician waste time making an issue out of it? A successful politician will not try to sell something nobody wants (contrary to the unsuccessful encyclopedia salesman, thrown out the window in Monty Python’s skit).
Compounding the problem is the fact that politicians are driven by the necessity to spend money on projects that will show tangible benefits (or soon to be achieved benefits) by the time they are running for reelection, be it in two, four, or six years, depending on where they sit in the political train.
“Shovel-ready” projects to build roads, to ease traffic congestions, to expand the subway, to build new infrastructure, are all winners. Changes to the income tax code or to other laws that will end up putting more money in everybody’s pockets are winners too. Changing the building code to prevent disasters when a severe earthquake or hurricane happens years—if not decades—after the next election is generally a “ho-hum” accomplishment. Possibly even a losing proposition.
It is worth repeating: If the population does not care, why should a politician care? That is the mirror effect: Politicians only reflect the priorities of the electorate. In that sense, scapegoating them is unfair—although, by definition, scapegoating is always unfair—but it sure feels good to beat on politicians. They are experts at deflecting blame, anyhow, and if not, a few heads falling is good group therapy.
WHO GIVES A DAM There are usually two acceptable ways for water to exit the reservoir behind a dam, namely, going through the intake pipes to feed turbines that generate power, or through spillways (or by-passes) specifically designed to drain excess water before it overtops the dam itself. Water flowing through any other way is either a looming problem, a big mess, or a catastrophe.
On February 7, 2017, torrential rains in Northern California23 led to a substantial increase in the level of Oroville Lake behind the Oroville Dam. The flood gates of the main spillway were therefore opened to let water through. The main spillway is effectively a concrete channel designed to direct water downhill in a straight line, with some devices at the end of the channel to dissipate much of the flow’s energy before it is returned to the natural river canyon. Sending water down a spillway is a normal operation to control water levels, and it should have been a routine operation on that day too. However, after a little while, something strange was observed in the flow of water about halfway down the three-thousand-foot-long spillway, and the gates were closed to figure out what was going on.
Inspection revealed a crater in the surface of the spillway.
The stability of the crater was tested by releasing controlled amounts of water, but the crater enlarged to a length of three hundred feet. Not good—particularly as water kept filling the reservoir in the meantime. Water in the lake was reaching critical levels, so on February 9, the spillway was reopened but only at half capacity in an attempt to prevent the crater from growing too much. Still, by February 11, the reservoir peaked to its all-time height and water started flowing over a concrete structure that served as the crest of a more rudimentary emergency spillway.
24 More specifically, by design, in the emergency spillway, after a smooth flow over a fifty-foot-wide concrete cap that protects the edges of the reservoir along the length of the spillway, water was sent cascading down the mountain, through nature, for the rest of the ride, all the way to the river canyon. Not a pretty “roller-coaster” ride, but it does the job as a temporary measure in an emergency. Unfortunately, this event was “less temporary” than intended by design: the reservoir level kept rising and erosion of the mountain was moving up close to the lip of the concrete cap of the emergency spillway, and doing so faster than expected. Failure was becoming a possibility—the type of failure that would send a deluge downriver. So by February 12, evacuation orders were issued to 188,000 people at risk. The main spillway was then open to full capacity; water jumped out of the spillway channel halfway through (at the crater location), carving a new river into the remaining mountain. Thankfully, sunshine returned in time after the rain, the inflow of water into the reservoir stopped, and the worst was avoided.
While the above story of this “close call” is interesting in itself—or not, depending on which outcome scenario one prefers—it is actually some of the non-technical findings from the independent forensic team report that give the most food for thought.25 Careful to highlight the fact that “the incident cannot reasonably be ‘blamed’ mainly on any one individual, group, or organization” 26 at the very start of the report, the forensic team makes the most damning statements: “Although the practice of dam safety has certainly improved since the 1970s, the fact that this incident happened to the owner of the tallest dam in the U.S., under regulation of a federal agency, with repeated evaluation by reputable outside consultants, in a state with a leading dam safety regulatory program, is a wake-up call for everyone involved in dam safety. Challenging current assumptions on what constitutes ‘best practice’ in our industry is overdue.”27 In other words, a panel of experts cumulating more than 230 years of experience in dam safety have called a nearly averted disaster at the tallest earth-dam in the United States (at 770 feet), holding up the second-largest lake in the state of California28 (1,140,000,000,000 gallons),29 a “wake-up call.” A wake-up call. Really?
As mentioned earlier, approximately every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) releases report cards on the state of infrastructure in America. In 2017, for its entire infrastructure, the country got a D+.30 That is not exactly brilliant (in most universities, a student with a D+ average would be expelled from engineering school). In 2021’s ASCE Report Card, America’s infrastructure improved to a C-grade—getting out of the D range for the first time in twenty years, pulled up by modest improvements in the infrastructures for aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports.31 On their own, dams—as one part of the country’s infrastructure—received a D grade on ASCE’s Infrastructure Report Card, both in 2017 and 2021. Dams received this D grade on account of the fact that there were more than 2,300 deficient “highhazard-potential” dams in need of repairs, rehabilitation, or replacement across the country. Note that 15,498 dams (17 percent of all dams in the United States) are considered to be “high-hazard potential”—a term defined to mean that people will die when they fail.32 An additional 11,882 dams are considered to be “significant-hazard potential,” defined as meaning that people are not likely to die if they fail (although unforeseen casualties are always statistically possible), and that only “significant economic losses” would ensue. Dams across the nation are on average more than fifty years old and the cost to repair the high-hazard potential dams alone is estimated to be $45 billion.33 The 2013 ASCE Report Card 34 was a bit more blunt, calling four thousand dams “deficient,” half of those being among the fourteen thousand “high-hazard dams.” The 2005 Report Card 35 was even blunter, labeling thirty-five hundred dams as “unsafe.” Since 1998, dams have held steady at a D grade—possibly because ASCE is more lenient than most university professors and does not give F grades.
So, if the events at the Oroville Dam were a wake-up call, there must have been a lot of snoring through the release of all the ASCE Report Cards. Parts of the six-hundred-page forensic report of the Oroville Dam failures provide some nuggets of information to explain why that may have been the case, particularly on how politics affects outcomes, by outlining a number of problems that were found to exist within the regulatory context.
Dam construction and operations in most countries— including in the United States—are only possible in compliance with a complex framework of regulations. This is because dam failures can be quite consequential. Yet catastrophic dam failures have occurred worldwide and more regularly than one would think (or wish) over the past century.
36 Given that water weighs a ton per cubic yard, it does not necessarily take the failure of a gigantic dam to produce a large number of casualties.
Take the South Fork Dam in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, built in the mid-1800s, which was 72 feet high and 918 feet long—not minuscule but not a behemoth either. When the earth dam was overtopped after days of severe rainfalls, it rapidly eroded and sent two million gallons of water downhill, wiping out the nearest town, and causing more than 2,200 deaths in the process.37 In California, the St. Francis Dam, a 185-foot-tall, 700- foot-long concrete arch-dam forty miles from Los Angeles, failed in 1928, less than two years after its completion.38 It was a failure so sudden that a 140-foot wave rushed down the canyon. It was still 55 feet tall ten miles farther down when it dissipated into the broader Santa Clara River valley, killing over four hundred people in the process—making it the second-largest California disaster after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.39 This prompted the creation of the Division of Safety of Dams (DSOD) in 1929,40 with the mandate to review and approve plans and specifications for new dams as well as alterations and repairs on existing dams, and to oversee their construction. It operates as an agency under the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).41 The Oroville Dam itself was built by California’s DWR42 and is owned and operated by the California State Water Project (SWP),43 which is also a public entity under DWR. To summarize and simplify, the operator (SWP) and the regulator (DSOD) are both divisions of the DWR—in short, all public employees working for the State of California, as one big family. Since the Oroville Dam generates electricity, it is also regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
As part of its forensic study, the independent team interviewed many key players in all these agencies, to gain an appreciation of the decision-making processes and safety procedures—or challenges related to those—that have led to the near-catastrophe of February 12, 2017. First, they met a DWR imbued with feelings of “overconfidence and complacency” shored by the widespread belief that all the SWP projects had been designed by nothing less than the “best of the best”44—like mythological giants. This belief was apparently handed down from generation to generation within the DWR, but was apparently not unanimously upheld, as one of the interviewees alleged that the Oroville spillways had been originally designed by an engineer fresh out of grad school who had never designed a spillway before and who relied on his class notes from hydraulic courses for what turned out to be his first professional design project— in other words, not quite a giant.45 The key challenge outlined by the forensic team was: DWR generally relied too much on regulators and the regulatory process to identify problems with its aging dam infrastructure, rather than proactively doing in-depth evaluations initiated by DWR and assuming full responsibility for the management and safety of its dam projects, as is required on both an ethical and legal basis. As with other factors, this reliance on regulators and the regulatory process was not atypical for large dam owners.46 Unfortunately, they also found that in the case of FERC and DSOD, both regulators had heavy workloads relative to their available staff, and due to being government agencies, they faced major bureaucratic constraints related to attracting, retaining, and adding qualified staff, as well as redirecting or terminating lowperforming staff. . . . In addition, a further challenge faced by regulators is that, while they may, in theory, be able to reference “tough” regulations when dealing with dam owners for the purpose of managing risks to the public, regulators often have difficulty in gaining compliance from dam owners in practice, because there are limitations to the sanctions they can reasonably impose.47 In other words, neither the operator nor the regulators had it within their mandate to check how the spillway designed decades ago would compare to one meeting today’s standards, or comprehensively review the dam safety programs in place to possibly identify some of the deficiencies that led to the problems in 2017.48 Instead, DWR opted to react to problems as they arose or as they were pointed out by regulators rather than to take actions proactively. The forensic team mentioned that this was not atypical for large dam owners because—and here is the real kicker—of “cost control pressures” and other factors that “make it dif f icult to justify proactively spending money to prevent problems that have not yet occurred.”49 Essentially, “if it is not broken, do not fix it”—but at a grand scale.
Citing the forensic team’s incisive analysis: In addition to cost control pressures exerted . . . specifically on DWR, there were also general pressures from the public to control the size and associated cost of California state government, of which DWR is a part. A primary mechanism through which this pressure was exerted on DWR was in controlling the number of staff positions in DWR’s organizational chart.
Rather than DWR having discretion to hire new staff as it determined necessary, the forensic team was told that new positions could only be added to the organizational chart with approval of auditors in the governor’s office, and requests to add such positions were routinely denied. This resulted in a situation in which DWR often had suf
f icient
budgets on paper to meet its objectives, but was chronically unable to fully make use of those budgets due to not having enough staff. This, in turn, also resulted in an increase in the amount of services contracted out to external consultants, which offset some of the cost control intended by limiting the size of DWR, but also entailed DWR needing resources to manage those consultant services.50 In simpler terms, citizens elect politicians who promise to cut taxes, and budget cuts are pushed down to government agencies. Critical operations must go on, but with fewer people, less (or deferred) maintenance, and less morale.
The attention is focused on short-term needs at the expense of long-term matters (such as proactively preventing problems). Every day, the short-term priority of the SWP is to meet its mandate of providing water to the entire population and the irrigated farmlands of the state, and producing hydroelectric power. And to do it now! The rest? It depends on available resources.
As stated in the forensic report, “DWR needed to balance these goals of ‘production’ versus safety, and lacked leadership and authority at the executive level which focused on finding the right balance.”51 It may take shrewd politicians to recognize the desire of the population to cut taxes and to campaign on such a platform, but all they do is mirror the will of the majority of the population—as it so works in a democracy. In other words, some politicians may be spineless puppets and some may even be horrible human beings, but blaming them for disasters—while a convenient stress-relief mechanism, possibly encouraged by mental health professionals to keep heart attacks and depressions at bay—is nothing more than misplaced anger. As stated before, a politician is a mirror.
If the attitude that hurricanes, earthquakes, and other hazards are “not a big deal” is widespread in the population, the disbelief in the true forces of nature becomes institutionalized—or, more accurately, politicized. In such circumstances, it would be illegitimate to claim after a disaster that the government has failed its citizens—no matter how deep the pain cuts—because it would simply amount to a refusal of looking in the mirror.
Incidentally, it is important to state that citizens may be fully justified for wanting to cut down the size of government, be it because of frustrations dealing with some civil servants that are neither civil nor serving, or for having witnessed the careless waste of taxpayers’ money that goes on in too many parts of the bureaucracy. However, when budget cuts have been imposed to government agencies in the past, have the uncivil employees lost their job and the wasteful activities ceased, or have the cuts hurt in the most sensitive parts of operations? At the extreme, in times of temporary severe fiscal constraints, some divisions of government agencies could manage to “squeak-by” by spending all of their budget to keep their staff on the payroll, but with nothing to do as there would be no budget left to spend on any of the operations and activities for which these agencies exist in the first place (some may have heard senior managers privately admit having done that at some point). Yes, government agencies are like big families, and, like all families, some are happy and productive, and some are hopelessly dysfunctional.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to shrinking the size of government, deferred maintenance has been a target of choice by managers who seek to meet reduced budgets, and since maintenance of infrastructure can be expensive, it has been a big target. Then again, this should not be totally a surprise given that, according to AAA, 35 percent of Americans “skipped or delayed service or repairs that were recommended by a mechanic or specified by the factory maintenance schedule.”52 In other words, to save $120 per year on oil changes, a third of car owners are willing to bet that they will trade in their car before having to fork the $4,000 it will cost to replace the engine when it is irremediably damaged for lack of maintenance.53 That amounts to approximately $25 billion in delayed maintenance—mostly overdue oil changes, worn brakes, bald tires, and other things that could cause severe breakdowns or fatal accidents.54 Maybe this is not surprising considering that 40 percent of the adults under thirty-five apparently do not know how to replace a wiper blade and would struggle to figure out how to add windshield washer fluid.55 Over the years, auto manufacturers have added red “warning lights” that pop-up when serious maintenance is overdue—called “idiot lights” by those in the industry;56 however, many drivers cannot be bothered and do not mind driving thousands of miles with an illuminated malfunction light—at least, until something actually breaks down and the car eventually stops by itself.
Likewise, another favorite target when it comes to reducing government spending is to cut down on travel. The ability to make good decisions depends in part on being aware of the state-of-the-art in one’s field of expertise, which is usually achieved through continuing education. It is often said that a century ago, half of what an engineer learned became obsolete over a career of thirty-five years.
By the 1960s, creation of new knowledge had accelerated, and it was estimated that it took only ten years for half of an engineer’s knowledge to become obsolete.57 In 2002, the president of the National Academy of Engineering ventured that, depending on the discipline, this “half-life” of knowledge had declined to between two and a half and seven years.58 Not surprisingly, most professional organizations nowadays require proof of continuing education activities as a way to keep current, and therefore as a requirement for renewal of professional practice licenses.
Continuing education is often achieved by attending conferences, participating in technical committee meetings, and completing training courses—which, admittedly, is more costly than staying chained to a desk and learning nothing new. A good way to cut costs is to hold conferences in relatively more affordable locations. Ironically, the cheapest places to hold conferences and meetings in the United States are Las Vegas and Orlando off-season. Hotels and airfares are cheap and almost every city has a direct flight to these destinations, which shortens travel time away from the of f ice and, correspondingly, loss of productivity. Yet, rare are the government agencies that dare to hold their meetings in Sin City or anywhere near Mickey Mouse. The whole idea became irremediably toxic after the US government’s General Services Administration—whose very mandate is to “streamline the administrative work of the federal government”—blew $800,000 in an extravaganza training session in Vegas for three hundred employees,59 complete with room parties, thousands of dollars in sushi, rented tuxedos, a session with a mind reader, and multiple trips to Vegas by management ahead of the conference to “scout” possible locations for the event.60 Yes, Vegas can be cheap and highly cost-competitive, but there are infinite ways for fools to rack up a bill in no time.
As a result, government meetings are typically held in places unlikely to attract attention. For example, the Committee on Bridges and Structures of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials is where the states’ bridge engineers meet to discuss changes and updates to a number of the nation’s bridge design specifications. It is important business. The committee has typically held its annual meeting in exotic Americana locations, such as Branson, Missouri; Montgomery, Alabama; Burlington, Vermont; Spokane, Washington; and similar places almost forgotten by airlines and not on the radar screen of wild and crazy party animals.
Pushing this logic to the extreme, in tough times, some public agencies have altogether banned travel for their employees. The easiest way for senior managers to avoid the risk that even a meeting in Pohenegamook (one campground, a couple of motels and less than three thousand population)61 could be perceived as a junket is to deny all travel requests. It also eliminates the need to decide what is justified and what is not—which is ideal for bureaucrats daunted by decisions.
In the meantime, while waiting for federal prisons to open convention centers within their walls, maybe staff can use Google searches to see if free online courses are offered by world-leading experts in dam maintenance, operations, and other valuable topics.
PUBLIC POLICY It is not clear if anybody ever woke up wondering if the day was going to be a Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, or Green day and changed their routine in any way as a consequence.
Actually, ask if anybody in a crowd can describe a memorable Red or Orange day, and expect to hear nothing but crickets.
The Department of Homeland Security was created a few months after the 9/11 attacks to integrate the activities of twenty-two different federal departments and agencies into a single one, with a staff of a quarter-of-a-million people, a $50 billion discretionary spending budget,62 and the mission to secure the nation from the many threats it faces.63 Shortly after it started operation on March 1, 2003,64 one of the department’s first accomplishments was “to provide a comprehensive and effective means to disseminate information regarding the risk of terrorist acts to federal, state, and local authorities and to the American people,” in response to a presidential directive.65 Called the “Homeland Security Advisory System,” it took the form of a color-coded scale to warn the public of the terrorism threat level at all times.
Red, orange, yellow, blue, and green warnings corresponded to severe, high, significant, general, and low risk. However, the decision to pick the color of the day was made behind closed doors, following an unpublished criterion, using evidence kept confidential, and therefore providing the public no way to assess the significance of the warning.66 Furthermore, for the eight years during which the system was used, yellow was the norm. The threat level was raised to orange for a grand total of roughly one hundred days, and to red only once. The blue and green levels were never enacted at any time—which cynics would argue is because terrorist events can be unpredictable, and would make the government look immensely foolish if one happened on a blue or green day.
To presume that Joe Schmo and Jane Doe would have taken seriously such warnings of impending danger (combined with authoritative reassurances that the government was on top of it and taking all necessary actions to ensure security) is tantamount to being unaware of the general level of skepticism of the public toward its leaders. Trust is something that must be earned, and if anything, the public trust in its government and institutions has been severely eroding over time. From a peak of 77 percent of the population trusting the government in 1964, down to 17 percent nowadays,67 it is quite a dive—but still scoring a tad bit higher than trust in used car salespersons, if that can be of any consolation. Studies show that 90 percent of Americans would ignore evacuation orders if given without explanations.
Yet, in spite of this massive distrust, the government must govern, which means making decisions. Every action of the government that impacts the public—by laws or funding priorities—can essentially be considered to be within the realm of public policy.
68 However, that does not imply that public opinion is surveyed every step of the way.
In fact, the government is usually quite busy advancing its own agenda. Senior officials in charge of various dossiers decide what to prioritize—including how to address vulnerabilities—how to spend limited budgets (hopefully wisely), and move forward, hoping for the best, working on assumptions as to what the public is willing or not willing to accept—or pay.
69 Inevitably, as the policy wheel turns, it will eventually roll over nails along the way. As something unexpectedly blows up, a media frenzy may ensue, it may grow to become a political hot potato, an emergency “patch” will be applied to plug the hole, the crisis will abate, the public interest will wane, and things will return to normal. That might be as much public feedback as most processes get along their course.
At the other end of the spectrum, for some hot topics, it is exactly the opposite. The public can be mobilized— actively or passively—in a specific cause in a way that will drive the process to change if a clear majority opinion can emerge out of the process.
Either way, a lot of public policy work has had major positive impacts on the lives of millions, thanks to the blood, sweat, and toil of policy wonks, and the activism of others.
Achieving effective public policy is as much art as rigor, patience, and timing. Experts know how this process can be nudged in a desired direction, always one step closer to a target outcome.70 They are also wise enough to know that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors—such as to defuse or prevent a crisis.
Before 9/11, half of the 126 crossings at the Canada-US border were unguarded at night, with orange cones put in the center of the roadway as an indication that the crossing was closed for the night—which had not stopped many drivers from simply running them over.
71 Nowadays, to make the border more secure, the cones have been replaced by infrared sensors in the road—and, sometimes, for convenience when in the middle of nowhere, a phone booth with dedicated lines for travelers to voluntarily call a US or Canadian customs of
f icer before entering the country.
72
Bilateral discussions on how to continue enhancing border surveillance are ongoing,73 but nobody has the desire —nor the budget—to build a fence along the 5,525 miles border. Neither side publicizes where the most porous parts of the border are located, but smugglers are known to work some of the weak points—in both directions, depending on the special needs of their clients.74 Most things when it comes to security happen under the radar, sometimes in odd ways and definitely invisible to politicians not interested in the details. So where does the politician come into the picture then? It has often been said that the focus on near-term profits and quarterly earnings has hollowed out many companies, cutting the investments needed to innovate and ensure their long-term survival. This has been attributed to CEOs lacking the expertise needed to understand the very product that their firm produced,75 or other reasons—such as predatory managers parachuted by a board of directors with the mandate to milk the cow dry for greatest immediate earnings. Not surprisingly, politicians can exhibit the exact behavior.
There is always an election around the corner, and image matters. What better way to display empathy than showing up in a disaster zone to act the leadership part in the postdisaster game. Good politicians excel at it because people swallow it all, temporarily forgetting awful character flaws and other faults. Others who have not read the “How to Charm the Media” script typically fail the audition or commit political suicide in the process. Michael Brown, head of FEMA at the time of Hurricane Katrina, is one who definitely did not get a standing ovation. In his own words: “Mis-handling of the press during the disaster response was among my greatest mistakes.”76 Within two weeks of landfall, with New Orleans still underwater, he had been so disparaged by the press that he decided to resign.77 As stated in the bipartisan committee report that investigated why the preparation and response to Hurricane Katrina was so disastrous, “Fair or not . . . Brown in particular had become the symbol of all that went wrong with the government’s response to Katrina.”78 Transcripts of emails released as part of the congressional investigation did more than raise eyebrows, including one from his press secretary advising him to roll up his sleeves like President Bush, “just below the elbow” to look hardworking, and one from himself stating, “If you look at my lovely FEMA attire you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”79 While Brown compared those comments to jokes that surgeons make in the operating room while saving precious lives,80 it did not endear him to the drowning folks in New Orleans. (Note to future FEMA heads: There is maybe a reason why surgeons never get invited to perform in comedy clubs.) In summary, disasters can provide opportunities for skillful politicians to steal the spotlight for their own advancement, and sometimes launch investigations that will deflect attention for months—and sometimes sacrifice a few scapegoats—once things return to “normal,” the normal after the disaster often being not that different from the normal before it. It was not an electoral issue in 2008 that the government did not have $15,000 in 2004 to fund an emergency hurricane response simulation before Hurricane Katrina, or even that Hurricane Katrina happened. Public policy issues that polarized the 2008 election81 were mainly universal health care and the fact that the Iraq war was still going on, at the rate of $200 million in spending per day in 200682 and more than double that in 2008.
So, if politicians are useless when it comes to public safety, then who is minding the store to prevent disasters? By default, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are building codes. This makes politicians irrelevant then. Building codes, thanks to their existence, must be taking care of the problem, right? The answer is an unequivocal “not quite.”
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
A Recipe for Disaster Decades ago, I decided to surprise my wife by baking her a birthday cake from scratch rather than purchasing one. In those days, long before the internet and even personal computers, she kept all of her favorite recipes on notecards stored in a wooden box. So mid-afternoon, when she was out running some errands, I pulled out a notecard that had the words “excellent” and “cake” on the header line, and proceeded to create my culinary masterpiece. The recipe seemed simple enough: Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, baking powder, vanilla extract. That was it. A handwritten bullet list of items. So, I put all the ingredients together in a large bowl, mixed everything until it seemed well blended, and baked the resulting dough. Made glazing similarly following another recipe with much fewer ingredients, and added candles. Voilà!
I still remember her surprise when I brought the “genuinely made from scratch by none other than your husband” birthday cake, and how long she paused before blowing out the candles, incredulous and stunned. I also remember that she was careful not to crush my enthusiasm after her first bite, and that her positive words skillfully balanced encouragement and restraint. Then, my first bite revealed the truth. The cake was full of dried lumps that made it plainly uneatable. Our marriage survived this experience at the antipode of gourmet cooking, but at that very moment, she must have wondered if I was trying to poison her. The “key ingredient” missing from her notecards was the sequence by which the ingredients had to be mixed to achieve a smooth texture—critical steps that the experienced cook that she was had not bothered to write on the notecards, as that concept was already clear in her head. She had never foreseen that a culinary illiterate apprentice would attempt to use any of her recipes.
There were no victims, but I learned the hard way that when things are created with the best of intentions, on paper they can make perfect sense and lead to outstanding results. However, when the underlying assumptions sustaining these constructs are unknown, the concepts, rules, and regulations that seemed perfectly logical when originally formulated can be applied in many unforeseen ways—leading to lumpy cakes and other disasters.

Earthquake Damage Happens Because . . .
BUILDING CODES Building codes as well as design specifications and standards are developed in many different ways across the world. In some countries, the codes are developed by committees of experts and stakeholders, and government legislation makes compliance with these documents mandatory for all construction—effectively making them national building codes. Governments in other countries, for lack of resources or other reasons, find it more effective and expedient to adopt a code developed abroad, translating it into the local language or, as a minimum, slapping a different cover page on top of it and disguising the content with crafty reformatting to make it look like a national code of their own. In some cases, the borrowing is acknowledged openly, for sake of transparency and convenience.
For instance, in many countries, the “Specifications for Structural Steel Buildings” produced by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) have been adopted—or copied—to become the official standard by which steel buildings must be designed. In fact, given that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is mindboggling that one of the countries that religiously follows the AISC requirements is—of all places—Iran! While the Iranian government has recurrently banned music from America the “Great Satan,”1 it has been more pragmatic when it comes to designing buildings.
In the United States, the way buildings codes are adopted is somewhat convoluted, not only because each document is often developed from scratch by necessity, but also because the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution effectively leaves to the people every power not specifically granted to the federal government.2 As such, regulation of the design and construction of buildings becomes the people’s responsibility, which they can elect to delegate to state governments, cities, or towns.3 In other words, instead of a top-down approach, it is a bottom-up approach, in what some would consider to be the purest form of democracy.
As far as specifying magnitude of loads to consider and quantifying design strengths to provide, there were no building codes for a long time in the United States—as in all countries for that matter. The oft-cited Code of Hammurabi, proclaimed by the king of Babylon circa 1754 BC and engraved in one of the most durable and hardest stones,4 is more an “eye-for-an-eye” legal statement than a building code per say. It stated: “If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If it kills the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death. If it kills a slave of the owner, then he shall pay slave for slave to the owner of the house.”5 And so on. It does not provide much details, but it “tickles pink” those who advocate that all building codes should be so simple, leaving it to the engineers to determine how to design buildings, and to the lawyers and judges to enforce execution—literally.
Beyond the sweeping statements of Hammurabi, prescriptive building codes typically came of age following disasters. Mostly fires. After the AD 64 blaze that devastated 70 percent of Rome over six days—the one Emperor Nero was rumored to be fiddling throughout (a popular myth, with a double meaning, but improbable musically since the fiddle was only invented in medieval times), and even to have started because he wanted to clear space for a new palace6 —rules were enacted for wider streets and fireproof walls between buildings.7 Likewise, throughout antiquity, following massive conflagrations, such as the 1666 Great Fire of London that consumed more than sixteen thousand houses,8 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that turned seventeen thousand buildings into ashes, killing three hundred people and leaving a hundred thousand homeless,9 some laws were typically enacted to prohibit certain types of construction.
That was all great to prevent the burning of buildings, but beyond that, for the most part, code requirements were enacted to set minimum standards for light, ventilation, plumbing, and other “livability” issues as a way to address sanitation and safety issues created by unscrupulous slumlords that endangered public health.10 In the best circumstances, the codes were enforced and served their purpose, but not always, as buildings departments in some cities were understaffed—when not outright corrupt.11 When it came to mandating minimum structural strength, nothing happened for a long time.
In the era of the master builders, from antiquity to the beginning of modern construction a little bit more than century ago, much was learned by trial and error. The focus of attention was to provide enough strength and stability for the building to resist its own weight and that of its occupants—essentially, a fight against gravity. Blessed were the workers who died in the collapse of medieval and Renaissance cathedrals, as they were rewarded— posthumously—with a free pass to heaven. While it may have been horrible for the five-hundred-foot tall stone tower of the Beauvais Cathedral—claimed to be the tallest building in the world at the time 12—to collapse during mass in 1573,13 management recovered brilliantly by calling it a miracle that only two people died in the tragedy. Obviously, there were no billboards along the roads of sixteenthcentury northern France advertising personal injury law firms that bragged about their ability to achieve a different kind of miracle, to help accident victims get the justice—and big settlements—they deserved.
As buildings were becoming taller and made of steel and reinforced concrete rather than wood or masonry, many started to design buildings to resist some lateral force considered to represent wind, but the determination of what value to use for that force was based on professional judgment—and certainly not mandated or specified by anybody.
When material was expensive and labor cheap, losing a few lives here and there was “par for the course.” Some of the workers building the skyscrapers and bridges of the early 1900s may have been showboating daredevils in front of cameras,14 but contrary to legend, most were normal people who understood the dangers but needed a job—and were as afraid of height as everyone else.15 When the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed from 1933 to 1937, it was the first large bridge project to include a safety net running a few feet under the entire bridge roadway during its construction. It saved the lives of nineteen workers who accidentally fell into the net. In an era where one death per million dollars in construction cost was considered normal, those survivors were called members of the “Halfway to Hell Club.”16 Definitely, leading the profession during the first half of the twentieth century were master builders—structural engineers at the very top of their game—like Gustave Eiffel (Eiffel Tower), Joseph Strauss (Golden Gate Bridge), John A.
Roebling (Brooklyn Bridge), and Homer G. Balcom (Empire State Building). Right after that, there were thousands of skilled engineers producing competent structures that have performed satisfactorily up to this day and—barring lack of maintenance—will continue to do so for a long time. Think of all the century-old buildings and bridges in every city’s downtown that are still in use—way beyond their original fifty-year design life. Unfortunately, beyond all that, there was the occasional problem, where an undesirable outcome happened not because of a phenomenon yet undiscovered by the profession, but rather due to the inadvertent unawareness by some engineers of problematic factors known to most other practitioners. Everything in life has a statistical distribution, with an average and a standard deviation. Medical doctors may refuse to admit it, but some of their classmates were “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” If all lawsuits were ruled to be frivolous and unfounded, maybe the malpractice insurance premiums would be lower—the American Medical Association reported that obstetricians on average paid $150,000 in annual premiums, and up to $250,000 per year in some parts of the country.
17 It is not a mere coincidence that many health care insurance plans cover the cost of getting a second opinion from a different medical doctor.
Likewise, it can be argued that structural engineering requirements in design standards came about in part to prevent recurring problems that easily could be avoided by listing specific requirements that must be met, stating “thou shall do this” and “thou shall do that.” These requirements then could be used not only by engineers, but also by packs of lawyers waiting to feed on errors and omissions—hence the commonly used name “errors and omissions coverage” in professional liability insurance.18 In fairness, as far as structures are concerned, because engineers are keenly aware of their foremost responsibility to protect the public, the discipline has created a sea of successes, with islands of failures—and not the islands of successes in a sea of failures that have been created by flippant computer jocks.
Note that the above text generically refers to design standards, or codes, or specifications, but nowadays, there are almost as many different design standards as there are types of structures. Evidently, wind is wind, earthquakes are earthquakes, and the laws of gravity are the same for everybody. Likewise, a steel structure is only an inanimate assemblage of beams, columns, and other steel pieces that will deform the exact same way when resisting loads and fail the exact same way when overloaded, whether the structure is supporting people, trucks, machinery, or roller coasters. Unfortunately—except for shareholders of the pulp and paper mills that produced the rolls of paper needed to print all of these documents—there are separate standalone documents that specify how steel structures should be designed for bridges, buildings, transmission towers, nuclear power plant, offshore platforms, and many more types of applications. This is in part because these different documents have emerged over time to address the needs of different industries. Also, as odd as it may sound, all that repetition is in the spirit of achieving simplicity, because engineers designing, for example, a steel bridge have to worry about slightly different problems than those designing a steel building. For instance, building designers must worry about properly fireproofing the steel structure to protect it from a fire burning for a few hours—not the case for bridge engineers. Bridge engineers must worry about the fact that the cumulative effect of millions of trucks crossing the bridge could fatigue the steel prematurely if detailing is not done a certain way, because this fatigue could lead to fracture and potentially collapse—not the case for building engineers. Of course, there are exceptions in both cases— landmark bridges should not collapse because of a tanker truck fire, and fatigue should be considered in a multistory bus terminal (which is a building). Still, design standards focus on the specific issues that drive the design of the runof-the-mill structures that fall within their scope, and do not waste time addressing issues that are usually irrelevant for the type of application at hand. For example, if somebody decides to construct an of
f ice building in the middle of a
river—no architect’s fantasy being denied nowadays—and that building is exposed to the risk of boat collisions, that is not addressed by building codes and the engineer will have to “borrow” from the bridge specifications.
With respect to buildings, in many countries, including the United States, “specifications” (or “standards” or documents by other names) dictate how structural members and their connections (that is, beams, columns, walls, floors, footings, bolts, welds, and many other parts and pieces) made of various materials (be it reinforced concrete, steel, masonry, timber, and many others) must be sized to resist loads. Then “building codes” prescribe the loads that must be considered and the analysis methods that must be used to account for those loads during the design process and cross-reference the specifications that must be complied with in this process.
When the US Constitution’s Tenth Amendment was ratified in 1791, lighthouses, windmills, churches, fort towers, and a handful of three-story (and the rare four-story) buildings were the tallest constructions in the nation. There were no building codes then, so there was no compelling reason to delegate to the federal government the power to regulate the design and construction of buildings. Hence, because of a decision made in the eighteenth century, there is no National US Building Code today—and likely will never be. Evidently, empowering the people to regulate construction, as democratic as it may sound, became problematic as construction moved into the modern era.
Many states and cities did not have the resources nor the expertise to develop building codes from scratch—and that is still the case today for most of them. As a result, modern building codes and specifications have happened as a voluntary effort with—as voluntary efforts often go— significant variations nationally and over time. To put it mildly, the situation quickly turned into a mess with respect to both specifications and codes, with multiple cities, states, agencies, and other groups all creating their own different documents.
In 1923, the American Institute of Steel Construction published its first edition of the “Standard Specification for the Design Fabrication and Erection of Structural Steel for Buildings,” a thin booklet with 9 pages of actual specifications—compared to the 2016 edition, which has 676 pages. This was done for the purpose of establishing “a single code authority that would be recognized by building code authorities and designers to eliminate the confusion that then existed in the construction industry, caused by the numerous and different manuals, each containing proprietary information.”19 In other words, to start cleaning up the mess. That AISC booklet was a specifications document.
As far as building codes were concerned, things were no better. A 1925 report published by the US Department of Commerce, when Herbert Hoover (an engineer) was its secretary, complained that the existing codes suffered from a lack of clarity and consistency and that this confusion was prone to error and the subject of much public criticism20— that is, it was another mess. As far as specifying the magnitude of gravity loads to consider in the design of structures, things were relatively straightforward. It is not rocket science to figure out the quantity of human flesh that can be tightly packed in a room in the worst possible conditions and apply a generous safety factor to it. Anybody who has been uncomfortably squeezed into an elevator with seven other people, while noticing the little plaque high above the control panel indicating “maximum capacity 21 persons,” will understand what a generous safety factor is— or will conclude that mechanical engineers design elevators for hobbits. Applying that concept to an auditorium is similarly done; imagine the room jampacked with screaming and jumping fans waiting for (say) the Beatles (if in the 1960s) and multiply the number of pounds by 2, or 3. It is the other less understood loads that were a problem, and prone to more variations from one document to another as a result of differing opinions.
Out of necessity, since the federal government could not impose anything on the states, and because most states and cities were thin on resources, engineers took the lead in drafting “model codes” that states and cities could adopt if they so wished. Motivated by natural disasters, and sometimes pressure from the insurance industry, three model codes were created under the aegis of private corporations. In 1915, the Building Officials and Codes Administrators International (BOCA) was founded, headquartered in Illinois. It diligently endeavored to eventually publish, thirty-five years later, in 1950, the first edition of the “BOCA Basic Building Code.”21 This code was generally adopted throughout the northeastern states.22 The southeastern states came up with their counterpart, as the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCC), founded in 1940, publishing their first edition of the Standard Building Code in 1945.23 As for the western states, they came up in 1927 with their own very own “Uniform Building Code” published by the International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO) in California.24 That was on top of individual codes developed by some cities (for example, New York and Chicago) and various branches of the federal government (the US General Services Administration had its own code, as well as each branch of the military, to name a few).25 To use the scientific term that aptly describes such a state of organization: it was a jungle. One may wonder how aggressively these organizations pursued the world market or if they were mostly international in name only—like the World Series in baseball —but they were certainly competing to become the “motherhood and apple pie” of building codes at the national level. While there was a sizeable amount of duplication in these model codes, they focused in more detail on earthquakes (ICBO), hurricanes (SBCC), or snow and wind (BOCA) reflecting the interests of their regional clientele and their geographic origin.26 That does not necessarily mean that they got everything perfectly right from the get-go.
THE GUESSING GAME After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, engineers were divided as to whether it was possible to design buildings to resist earthquake forces. Not only were the geological mechanisms that produced earthquakes poorly understood, but so were the laws of physics and engineering that could explain why some buildings collapsed and others did not.
Therefore, amid all that confusion, reconstruction of the devastated city proceeded with an updated building code that—at last, after many years waiting for it—required the consideration of a wind force of thirty pounds per square feet (1.44 kPa) for the design of new buildings.27 No specific earthquake-resistant design clauses were introduced.
Given that many building codes of that time had been designed without any specific requirements for wind resistance (such as the Los Angeles building code, which had no requirement to consider any wind pressure in design until 1924), it was hoped that the new “stringent” wind pressure applied horizontally on the building façade over its entire height would simultaneously address both wind and earthquake effects.28 The 1927 Uniform Building Code introduced the first seismic design requirements in North America, partly in response to the Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925. This model code proposed clauses for possible inclusion in the building codes of various cities, at their discretion, and was not binding. In particular, it proposed that a single horizontal point load, F, equal to 7.5 percent or 10 percent (depending on the soil conditions) of the sum of the building’s total weight, be considered to account for the effect of earthquakes.29 Interestingly, Professor Toshikata Sano of Japan, who visited San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and probably noticed the very clear horizontal displacements that had taken place across the San Andreas fault, got the idea of using seismic inertia force to design for earthquake action.30 After all, the very same Isaac Newton that had published the theory of gravitation in 1666 had also demonstrated in 1686, in his second law of motion, that a force is equal to a mass times an acceleration (the “F = m a” equation that stresses students taking high school physics). Building on that, Professor Sano—most definitely a high school student that got it right—stated that the seismic force is given by the ground acceleration multiplied by the mass of a structure and then recommended that this acceleration be taken as equal to 10 to 30 percent of the gravity acceleration. Given that a weight is, in itself, a mass times this gravitational acceleration, this proposal effectively called for using a horizontal force equal to 10 to 30 percent of the building’s total weight—that is 0.1 to 0.3 times its weight. The lower of these two values had been adopted in Japanese building design regulations in 1924. Dr.
Kyoji Suyehiro of Japan visited California and reported in a series of lectures that buildings designed using the value of 0.10 in Japan survived the tragic Kanto (Tokyo) earthquake of Richter magnitude 8.2 in which one hundred forty thousand died.31 That was as good a starting point as any. Enforceable earthquake-resistant design code provisions in North America were implemented following the 1933 Long Beach earthquake of magnitude 6.4. This earthquake produced damage in Long Beach and surrounding communities in excess of $42 million in 1933 dollars (more than $400 million in 1995 dollars),32 and the death toll exceeded 120.33 As briefly mentioned earlier, it was significant that a large number of the buildings that suffered damage were schools and that the total number of casualties and injuries would have undoubtedly been considerably larger had this earthquake not occurred at 5:54 p.m., when the schools were fortunately empty.
Nonetheless, this economic and physical loss provided the necessary political incentive to implement the first mandatory earthquake-resistant design regulations—in other words, there is no better way to get parents to do something than to show them how their kids could be killed if nothing is done, and that is what “closed the deal” in 1933. The California State Legislature passed the Riley Act and the Field Act, the former requiring that all buildings in California be designed to resist a lateral force equal to 2 percent of their total vertical weight, the latter mandating that all public schools be designed to resist a similar force equal to between 2 and 10 percent of that weight, with the magnitude of the design lateral force depending on the building type and the soil condition.
From there, things improved every year. Slowly, but still.
For example, eventually, in 1994, BOCA, SBCC, and ICBO merged into a single entity, to publish at the dawn of the new millennium a unified document called the “International Building Code (IBC),”34 which managed to receive significant national endorsement—although still far from the world dominance suggested by its name. This integration broadened the consensus, which is good, but when it comes to model codes and specifications, it remains that cities and states are entirely free to adopt, or not adopt, or adopt in part, or modify the model code as they so wish, by virtue of the Constitution.
In parallel, codes and specifications also improved in terms of the complexity of analysis tools, detailing, and construction quality required to design buildings to resist earthquakes, but also in terms of how large the horizontal earthquake force to consider is. For example, it is now recognized that many buildings in San Francisco would need to be designed for lateral forces as large as 100 percent of their weight if they were to survive undamaged the size of earthquakes considered in modern design. That is not a small thing. A building able to resist a horizontal force equal to 100 percent of its weight could be rotated by 90 degrees and hung sideways from the face of a cliff—something that would be far from functional but that an architect on drugs may end up doing someday, forcing the building occupants to walk on walls. Yet buildings that use certain types of structural systems, when built on rock (rather that soft soils like clay and others), can still be legally designed nowadays considering a horizontal force equal to only a tenth of that, namely, 10 percent of their weight—or less. This is at the cost of many requirements to satisfy and many hoops to jump through, but doable—and done every day.
CHAMELEON CODES Although Gollum’s mother is not featured in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there is no doubt that she is proud of her child and finds him to be an adorable cutie. That is what mothers do. Likewise, the engineers who have given their blood, sweat, and tears to the task of creating the codes and standards that they cherish may expect the world to embrace them. Yet, the world is a strange and interesting place. As Plato observed a few millennia ago, “Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder.”35 Hence, one form of technological disaster is the resistance to adopt measures that will prevent disasters down the line. Professionals may have had some successes in creating codes and standards ready to be adopted, but that does not mean they are adopted (when it comes to making a jurisdiction adopt codes and standards, as in all things in life, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”). It remains a process, a work in progress.
Some cities and some states have been keen in adopting building codes, and some have ferociously resisted doing so, in the name of freedom—for lack of a better term. By the end of 2010, a FEMA study tallied the number of Midwest jurisdictions exposed to high seismic risk that had adopted a building code—any building code—that included seismicresistant provisions.36 Interestingly, it reported, “The State of Missouri relies on the local jurisdictions to adopt and enforce their own building codes. The State only demands that projects for State-owned facilities must be designed in accordance with the latest edition of the International Building Code.” In other words, a new two-hundred-seat state courthouse will be designed in compliance with the national model code, but for a two-thousand-seat movie theater, anything is possible; consult the local jurisdiction.
What each local jurisdiction will do is up to them, which leaves many at a disadvantage given that small jurisdictions do not always have engineers on staff, let alone a building department.
In the same spirit, in Arkansas in 2016, seismic design requirements were waived for some projects because it made construction cheaper. Note that waivers were also provided to construct in flood zones because it created economic development.37 It is significant that part of Arkansas is on top of the New Madrid earthquake fault, where three earthquakes close to magnitude 8 have struck in 1811 and 1812.38 Overall, as reported in the same FEMA document, in the six states that are affected by the New Madrid seismic area, “adoption and enforcement of building codes . . . is spotty at best.”39 FEMA is being polite.
Code adoption tangles are not limited to earthquakes but are symptomatic across the board, irrespective of hazards.
Like college students partying on Florida beaches in the middle of a pandemic, convinced of the invincibility of their immune system and not about to let all these fake-news stories disturb their drunken plans, some groups oppose any building code rules and restriction. What earthquakes? What hurricanes? What floods? Why kill the fun with imaginary problems?
As of 2018, Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, Illinois, and Alabama (to name a few) still had no mandatory statewide codes.40 None.
Earthquake design requirements: Zero.
Hurricanes and flood design requirements: Nada.
Too stressful? OK, how about basic requirements to resist gravity loads: Zilch.
Slightly better, some states are happy to adopt outdated versions of the codes, but are leaving it entirely to local building officials to decide whether or not to enforce them.
Georgia adopted an IBC edition six years older than other states;41 other jurisdictions prefer versions that are even more archaic.42 Why not? In fact, why worry so much about building codes if, in the end, the federal government will bail out those who will lose their homes in a future disaster?
Logically, the federal government’s largesse should be trimmed down when it comes to providing disaster aid to states that fail to adopt mandatory up-to-date buildings codes, but when FEMA suggests that this should be the way of the future, the states have ferociously lobbied against the idea and got their way—irrespective of which political party was in power.
43 What about progress then? When new knowledge is learned to improve how things should be done, the model codes change, and things are improved with every new edition, published every three years. By inference, do those improvements automatically go into the building codes of the more disciplined states and cities that have adopted the model codes? Sadly, not necessarily. For example, in 2018, the Florida Home Builders Association lobbied for the State to stop automatically adopting these changes, on the basis that “fewer code changes overall (. . .) will keep the cost of a home from increasing superfluously.”44 On the strength of this sweeping belief, the Florida governor signed into law a bill that did just that—against the opposition of the insurance industry, the real estate industry, engineers, architects, firefighters, and building inspectors. That “tickled pink” the National Association of Home Builders, which had the firm conviction that States should not impose mandatory building codes and that the decision on how homes should be built is best left to local of
f icials—who are
presumably more knowledgeable and incorruptible. Far less impressed, the head of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety commented: “We just have an incredible capacity for amnesia and denial in this country.”45 Yet, amid all these backward steps, in some places, things move forward one small step at a time. As a case in point, in 2020,46 Chicago adopted the International Building Code;47 it was the city’s first major building code revisions since 1949 (although, admittedly, multiple small modifications had occurred over that seventy-year period).48 In retrospect, it is instructive that in many cases— although not all of them—whenever a regulation has been enacted, it has often been an “after the fact” action intended to prevent recurrence of past problems. If implementation of a new rule is going to cost extra money, it takes a lot of indubitable, convincing evidence and sustained efforts to bring about its approval by consensus— a lot of hand waving and charisma alone will not cut it. In contrast, after a failure—or worse, a collapse—the time is ripe to fix the problem and move forward. Forward thinking does happen at times, but hindsight is always 20/20.
In short, it takes disasters to make progress. Fortunately, much progress will come because the future is pregnant with more disasters.
THE TINY CHRISTCHURCH EARTHQUAKE On December 22, 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake stuck Christchurch in New Zealand—a modern developed country that is part of the elite club of those few that can claim to have some of the most advanced design standards when it comes to providing earthquake-resistant buildings. A magnitude 6.3 earthquake is approximately one hundred times smaller than what is expected to occur on the San Andreas Fault in California, but it still has some punch. Two older reinforced concrete buildings that predated modern seismic design standards collapsed, and a large number of unreinforced masonry buildings suffered major damage, but beyond that, the modern buildings in Christchurch’s Central Business District (CBD) suffered damage but did not collapse, allowing the safe egress of their occupants.
However, damage was so widespread throughout the CBD that the authorities decided to evacuate everybody and close off the entire area. At first, security forces controlled this limited access, then, a fence was built. The entire CBD was turned into a “red zone,” allowing controlled access to professionals involved in authorized response and recovery activities, but keeping everybody else out. This created an eerie ghost town in which food was left to rot on restaurants counters, stores displayed their full inventory through broken windows, and wallets, purses, and passports accidentally left in hotel rooms during the rush of the evacuation could not be retrieved. These were tough measures to ensure safety and prevent looting, but harshly criticized by owners and residents. Eventually, limited access was granted and the fenced-off area was progressively reduced in size, but it still enclosed many city blocks by the second anniversary of the earthquake, with a new type of damage progressively taking root there while awaiting repairs/reconstruction—at least it was green damage, if any consolation to nature lovers.
By early 2015, more than twelve hundred of the CBD buildings had been demolished, with many more slated to suffer the same fate, turning the CBD into an oversized, unpaved parking lot. By 2018, although the CBD felt like a massive construction site, rebuilding was barely halfway through.
Yet, structural engineers agreed that that the modern engineered buildings in the CBD behaved exactly as they were expected to do during the December 2011 earthquake.
What is wrong with that picture?
It has to do with the car crash analogy. This requires some explanations.
First, it must be acknowledged that, in light of all the barriers and hurdles met on the road to establishing building codes, the progress made on the development of building codes and standards over the past century is commendable.
Even more impressive is the rapid evolution that has taken place over the last few decades. It has all been achieved through the relentless efforts of silent heroes who devoted themselves to enhancing the world’s safety by minimizing the risk posed by many hazards, to possibly avoid some— but not all—future disasters. At the same time, all this important work was done by professionals from many disciplines who reached consensus and used judgment and experience to make educated guesses as to what the public would consider acceptable economically and politically.
Some would argue that the public does not know what it wants—or actually that the public knows that it wants everything, while wanting to pay for nothing. As a result, “what the market will bear” has been taken as a proxy for the voice of the public, and has been interpreted as the lowest possible cost—especially when that voice is expressed by developers driven by the goal of maximum return on investment.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with this approach.
What is problematic with it is the fact that the design philosophy embedded in building codes is one of “life safety,” not “damage prevention.” Life safety is as low as engineers are willing to lower the bar. This is because “engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.”49 That is their top priority. It is the fundamental canon of the code of ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers. In other words, save their lives—not their property. This “life-safety” objective has been adopted worldwide, but has typically not been explicitly communicated nor understood by all the public and building owners. In other words, most of them fail to recognize that building codes explicitly provide minimum standards—and many engineers firmly believe (and have vehemently argued) that this is exactly how it should be and that it should never change.
This philosophy is often justified by making an analogy, comparing the design of a building with that of a car. Much like compliance with the building code is required for construction to be legal, state vehicle laws define what makes a car “street legal.” Most car manufacturers offer a basic entry-level model that meets these minimum requirements. It is allowed to circulate legally, but is typically a subcompact that does not have much—if any— luxury, gadgets, performance, space, comfort, and— sometimes—longevity. Although the analogy is somewhat imperfect here (because crash-worthiness is not a mandatory requirement for a car to be legal), when shopping for a car, most people nowadays assume that automobiles have at least a decent crash-test rating that will help them survive a major collision (and manufacturers with the best ratings make this distinction part of their marketing strategy). However, everybody understands that the car itself would be most likely “totaled” in a severe accident. If that is a concern to a specific customer, the option always exists to buy a Sherman tank instead.
Although more costly, it would certainly allow one to drive through traffic oblivious to the risk of collisions. In fairness, the analogy is also imperfect because the percentage increase in cost to “upgrade” from a car to a Sherman tank grossly exceeds the more modest increase to go from a “life-safety” to a “damage-prevention” building design, but the fundamental concept is the same. It is the philosophy of providing a minimum design to achieve “life-safety” instead of damage prevention that has driven building codes— arguably, to make buildings more affordable.
The above car analogy is useful, but it has one major flaw. Most car collisions involve a couple of vehicles— sometimes a few more and sometimes only one. In contrast, if all buildings in a region struck by an earthquake have been designed following the life-safety perspective, a more appropriate analogy would be that of a massive car pile-up involving dozens of vehicles like those that happen due to icy roads or fog (Germany and Brazil being record holders in this regard, with more than 250 cars each in a single pileup). In other words, during an earthquake, everybody ends up in the same “car-crash” at the same time. Such widespread building damage can paralyze a region, a city, or its core as happened following New Zealand’s Christchurch earthquake. When the entire CBD was evacuated, cordoned, and then fenced-off for months, it affected everybody—even the owners of buildings that did not suffer any damage. In a pandemic, it is good but of limited benefit to be healthy when everybody else is sick; the same is true in a region devastated by any other hazard —to be the last one standing is of little consolation. It is fair to expect that a similar large-scale urban mayhem will happen in many other cities worldwide. Prominent structural engineers have already estimated that half of the buildings in San Francisco would have to be shut down following a major earthquake.50 A study conducted to investigate the effectiveness of investing in improving things before an earthquake found that each dollar invested to design to a level that exceeds the minimum code requirement provides a $4 benefit in return—in other words, repairs after an earthquake will be four times more expensive than investments before the fact.51 The return on investment is even higher for floods and hurricanes. But that would require going above the minimum requirements of the building code—apparently not a popular idea. In California, in 2019, an attempt was made to pass a bill that would have mandated that all new buildings be designed to be fully functional after an earthquake. The substantially watered-down version that reached the governor’s desk was vetoed,52 even though it only called for the creation of a working group to study the option and make recommendations.53 A subsequent bill followed, still asking for a similar workgroup; it died in the Senate.54 A third one is under review, seeking to develop a standard that would optionally allow setting target times before a building regains its functionality following an earthquake, and setting the wheels in motion to discuss this idea with all stakeholders to determine the possible content of such a standard.55 That still leaves a lot to discuss and resolve before action is taken, but that would be progress.
What are the chances of something similar to be even considered in the other western, central, and eastern states at highest risk of experiencing damaging earthquakes? For now, zero. This is because going above the existing lifesafety design levels costs a bit more today—even though it can save a lot tomorrow.
In truth, costs matter. On a building project for which a developer is seeking rental income to produce a 7 percent return on investment, if extra measures increase the cost of the building by 5 percent, the return on investment drops to approximately 2 percent. The developer would be better off to invest in bonds that would provide a better and safer return. Unless, the cost can be passed on to the tenants— which brings it all back to what the public wants, or what the market will bear. In other words, by how many dollars per square foot can the lease rate of a building be increased for tenants to be excited and say that this is a worthwhile investment? How about zero?
This is because, with some rare exceptions, nearly everybody is unaware of the fact that building codes are minimum design requirements only intended to provide “life safety.” The public is usually surprised to learn that this is the case, which is usually after an earthquake has produced much structural and nonstructural damage. In fairness, more and more engineers nowadays, in some parts of the world, make it a priority to inform their clients of this situation and offer them options that could reduce or eliminate damage, but even when that happens, many owners choose the less expensive “life safety” option. This is what has happened in many cases even following the Christchurch earthquake, and even more so as the earthquake becomes more distant in the past. Except that, at least, in this case, with all information in hand and recognizing the consequences, the decision is effectively a deliberate bet that the earthquake will not happen soon— arguably a defendable position, possibly relying on insurance to cover the risk or gambling that the future cost will not be fatal.
Fundamentally, this is a pay-now versus pay-later decision, with all the potential pitfalls and perils.
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
The Best of the Best A few decades ago, as part of a political panel of top government officials invited to say a few words of welcome during the opening session of an earthquake engineering conference in Memphis, Tennessee, the representative from Arkansas made it a point to brag that in his state—across the river from Memphis—there were no building codes.
At the time, I had no idea that such a practice existed in some states, and I certainly did not understand why this was a matter of pride. When I caught up with him during the break, I asked, “How do engineers design buildings in Arkansas if there is no building code?” Without skipping a beat, he responded: “They don’t need a code. Our state has the best engineers in the world.” There. Take note. If looking for engineers to design the next World Trade Center, look no further than Arkansas.

Fatalism: A Really Short
Chapter
WHAT GOD WANTS Typically, in most parts of the world, after buildings have collapsed and killed people during an earthquake, a window of opportunity opens, making it possible to change building codes to enhance the performance of buildings during future earthquakes and prevent the recurrence of similar disasters. That is good—at least, for those who survived.
Yet, in some parts of the world, even after an earthquake has killed thousands of poor souls when buildings of shoddy construction collapsed, nothing changes. During the reconstruction, sound advice that it might be time to do something different is met with a shrug. Probing further and asking why should people be dying all the time from one earthquake to the next leads to the answer: “If that is what God wants . . .” That is, fatalism—in its worst possible incarnation. This is not religious fanaticism, but rather unintentional obstruction. Inevitably, after every disaster—be it an earthquake, a pandemic, or a locust infection—some people will interpret these disasters as expressions of the “righteous anger of God” invited by God-defying wicked souls. For those waiting for signs of the long-awaited apocalypse, the bigger the natural disaster, the more theologically titillating it gets. In some ways, this is religious activism, co-opting a disaster to promote a specific worldview. Fortunately, most religious folks are not so extreme; they take no joy in a disaster.
Instead, like everybody else, they can see the opportunity to help build a better and safer world and can be proactive forces toward that goal—even if still promoting their specific worldview while doing so.
Fatalism is none of that. It is quite the opposite. Nothing is more frustrating for engineers—who, by their natural inclination, wish to improve things for the greater good— than hitting the wall of fatalism. Nothing hurts efforts to implement changes toward preventing catastrophes more than this frontal collision with a doctrine proclaiming that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable.1 It is a personal choice to be religious—a constitutionally protected freedom in some countries—so that is fine in itself. However, being religiously fatalistic and ignorant is a total disgrace and an insult to humanity. Fatalism, in essence, implies that if people died during the earthquake, it is because God wanted them dead—as some sort of grand spring-cleaning event, weeding out the garden. If God wants something, then it will happen (as Roger Waters said in simpler terms in a song).2 On that basis, any attempt to make buildings more earthquake resistant is pointless, as it would effectively be attempting to make buildings God resistant, an impossible endeavor from a fatalistic perspective.
With respect to the Three Little Pigs analogy, a fatalist is a brand apart. It is actually like a Fourth Little Pig looking at the straw, wood, and brick huts, who shrugs and rather pulls a reclining lawn chair to bask in the sun: what the Big Bad Wolf wants is for it to decide. Might as well provide the roasting spit and a bottle of BBQ sauce right next to the chair, for the world’s benefit. If that is what God wants . . .
or what fate has in store, for that matter, for those who subscribe to atheistic fatalism.
One could spend a lot of time here expanding on the nuances and variants of religious and nonreligious fatalism (such as determinism, fallibilism, nihilism, solipsism, defeatism, and other philosophical orgasms). However, for all practical purposes and the topic at hand, suffice to say that it is a massive waste of time to attempt convincing those who firmly believe otherwise that the outcomes of earthquakes are not inevitable and preordained by God (or destiny) and that human endeavor can change such outcomes—until they realize that they are actually the ones dying during an earthquake, which is a bit late to come to grips with reality.
Therefore, fatalists of this world will continue to die in one earthquake after another, maybe removing some fatalistic genes from the human genome in the process— although history has not shown this to have much of an impact in this regard.
FAKE FATALISM A word of caution is in order. Fatalism is sometimes nothing more than politely expressed resignation in the face of abject poverty, ingrained government corruption, and other societal ailments that make it dif
f icult—if not outright
impossible in the short term—to improve the state of things.
In some pictures of collapsed buildings following the Haiti earthquake of 2010, one can see, among the rubble, pieces of columns without a single reinforcing bar. Plain concrete without steel bars is brittle, like chalk. These bars play such an essential role in reinforced concrete construction that an independent inspector is usually hired to verify that these reinforcing bars have been properly placed before the concrete is cast. In corrupt places where shoddy construction does not induce moral anxieties in contractors, because concrete is cheap compared to steel reinforcing bars, there is much temptation to pour the concrete into the formwork without all the required bars, or without any bars outright. Even if the inspector has integrity and cannot be bribed to look the other way, it might be possible to take the bars out of the formwork after the inspector has seen them and has left, pour the concrete into that empty formwork, and dump the bars into another column ready for the next inspection. Since the bars are not visible after the concrete is cast, who can tell? Until the earthquake destroys it all, that is. If that slimy trick can be played in countries where building codes exist and inspection is mandatory in an attempt to enforce them, imagine what happens where no such things exist and construction pretty much follows an “anything goes” mentality.
3 One should never forget that, in some places, shoddy construction practices are so widespread that buildings sometimes collapse on their own —without help from any earthquake.4 Suspicion of bribes and widespread government corruption are inescapable when brand-new construction collapses. For example, the brand-new $15 million wing of a hospital was severely damaged during the magnitude 7.3, November 12, 2017, earthquake in Iran,5 roughly a year after its construction. Experts who assessed the structure in the days following the earthquake stated that the wing not only needed to be demolished, but that it would likely have entirely collapsed if not for the fact that it was braced by the barely damaged older wing of the hospital built forty years earlier.
6 Outraged citizens deplored the country’s state of systemic corruption and angrily shouted at the president.
Maybe the broadcast brutal punishment of one sacrificial goat will appease the public, but it remains that this could have been prevented—unless, of course, this is what God really wanted.
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
Seeing It Is Believing It I considered myself lucky one summer to have landed a job working at La Grande-4, in Northern Québec, for the Société de développement de la Baie James, an organization modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority and tasked to develop the massive dams, dikes, power stations, and other infrastructure for one of the largest hydroelectric projects in the world.7 In the summer between the sophomore and junior years, civil engineering students have little marketable technical skills to offer, so the opportunity to work as an inspector in such a massive project could not be turned down.
That far north, the boreal forest consists of hundredyears old black spruces that look like dwarf shrubs, the difference between mosquitos and B-52s is that the B-52s do not bite, and sunrise and sunset at the summer solstice occur at 4 a.m. and 10 p.m., respectively. The construction camp consisted of clusters of prefabricated bedroom units linked together around central restroom and shower utilities —all with the thin walls, bouncy floors, and other luxuries that come with temporary construction. Employees were flown there because the 1,550-mile-long road to get there from Montréal is best traveled only by large trucks and wildlife (particularly the last 300 miles on very rough gravel). The luggage loaded into the plane was carefully weighed because fully loaded planes were too heavy to land or take off from the short runway in La Grande-4—which made for some quite memorable acrobatic landings.
Arriving at the construction camp fresh off the plane, all new employees were directed to the check-in office to get their room assigned for the summer. The clerk who called my number looked like an archetypical member of the Hells Angels, in stature, girth, beard, and tattoos per square inch, but was impeccably clean and well mannered—a government employee after all. He told me: “During the summer, the camp is filled two persons per room. By the way, I have not been assigned a roommate yet, so if you want, you can share my room.” I am not sure how others would react to that offer, but instinct (or selective exposure) told me it was best not to accept when a big bearded, tattooed dude offers to share his room—so I declined. “No problem,” he said, as he assigned me another room. “Don’t hesitate to come back and see me if you change your mind.” When I arrived at my assigned room—a bare ten-by-tenfoot box with two single beds and two small desks, the roommate was not there, but I could immediately guess his literary preferences from the colorful, hard-core centerfolds plastered on every single inch of walls on his side of the bedroom. An hour later, the door opened and my roommate arrived, in his dusty construction clothes. Without even removing his steel-toe boots, he crashed on his bed and was snoring profoundly within minutes.
I returned to the check-in of
f ice hoping the polite biker
would still be there. Delighted to find that he was, I asked him why exactly he had offered to share his room. He said, “During the cold months, things slow down here, the number of workers drops, and I have my room to myself.
During the summer, we have to double up. I am in charge of assigning rooms, so you can bet I have one of the largest and nicest ones—with a satellite TV and stereo too. By far, I prefer to have a clean university kid in there who will leave at the end of August than a construction worker that will dirty up everything. Besides, you would have my room to yourself because my girlfriend has also been assigned a room on her own and I am staying with her all the time.” “Deal!” All of that is to say that making an enlightened decision is simply not possible when the consequences of the decision are unknown and preexisting beliefs stand in the way. With beliefs, as with first impressions or confirmation bias, perception and reality can be at odds and lead far from the most desirable outcome. At least, it almost did for me.
Sixteen feet of
fset in fence near Point Reyes created
by slip of the San Andreas Fault in 1906. U.S.
Geological Survey Formerly straight road now permanently offset due to fault slippage during 2010 Darfield earthquake near Christchurch (five months before the more famous 2011 Christchurch earthquake) Parkfield, the earthquake capitol of the world. Photo by Linda Tanner This steel frame is all that is remaining of the Emergency Operations Center of the town of Minamisanriku destroyed by the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. The building was fully underwater; twentyfour of the thirty occupants made it to the roof; only a few survived by climbing the antenna or holding on to the top of stair guardrail. Richard Eisner and EERI As the tsunami wave pushed debris inland (from right to left in this photo), a blue truck wrapped itself around this column of the Shizugawa Hospital in Minamisanriku. Richard Eisner and EERI Damage to Biloxi-Ocean Springs Bridge, one of several destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Photo courtesy of Jerome S. O’Connor, P.E. Example of beach erosion due to storm surge during a small hurricane that did not even make landfall This formerly ocean front home is now ocean front, ocean back, and ocean sides Hard hat as part of school uniform for kids living on Sakurajima Volcano. Osumi River and National Highway Of f ice, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Japan Volcano tourism inside Whakaari/White Island, New Zealand’s most active cone volcano (on a dormant day), rising 5,250 feet from seafloor, 1,050 feet above sea level Collapsed double decker Cypress expressway in Oakland, California, during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Vehicles on the lower deck were crushed by the collapsing upper deck. Second floor is now first floor for this apartment building in the Marina District of San Francisco, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
Home sweet home, 550 feet from the Hayward fault on which also sits the U.C. Berkeley football stadium US Geological Survey—annotations by Michel Bruneau
Unique view from eighty-fifth story of Taipei 101, dwarfing all other buildings in sight. Photos by Dan Dowden Oroville Dam spillway damage, first shown with outflow of 100,000 cubic feet per second on February 15, 2017, then after cutting outflow to zero on February 27, 2017. California Department of Water Resources At 7 a.m. in Christchurch, a drunk decided that this heavily damaged and closed pedestrian bridge was good enough. He made it to the other side, proving that there is a god for drunks. Temporary memorial artwork in remembrance of the victims of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake Growing damage in fenced-off Christchurch Business District in the years following the 2011 Earthquake Deadly shower of bricks from an unreinforced masonry building. This example speaks for itself. This building was resilient and survived the earthquake well, but it was crushed by the unreinforced masonry wall that fell from a far less resilient neighbor, which shows that resilience is a team sport. Clown Doctors of New Zealand: Not exactly what I expected to find in a disaster area, but this clown was dead serious when it came to using the medical art of joy and laughter to fight traumatic stresses. Where road A1A used to be in that part of Florida before the ocean progressively reclaimed the land after successive storms—now a sand trail only accessible by four-wheel drive vehicles Surprise, the sand is gone! Example of beach erosion following a storm Ruins of the only structure left standing near ground zero after an atomic bomb exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima. This “Genbaku Dome” is preserved as part of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and is also designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site


MEET THE FUTURE

Gloomy Predictions
THE “SLIPPERY SLOPE” DISCLAIMER It has been established so far that it typically takes a disaster to trigger actions leading to major changes in how the world prepares for and deals with extreme events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and other natural and anthropogenic hazards. Building on this fact, some extrapolation is performed here to get a glimpse of what the future might have in store when it comes to some existential threats, focusing specifically here on monetary instability, climate change, overpopulation, and nuclear holocaust, and—on the way there—putting to rest the myth that resilience will save the day.
That being said, one should approach the material presented in this third part of the book with a reasonable dose of skepticism, because a lot of the interpretations and inferences that follow are about the future. As such, they are—inescapably—predictions, which is the very thing that has been argued all along to be unreliable. The quote about the dif f iculty of prediction, especially about the future cited in an earlier chapter, is equally applicable here. Full disclosure: the author has no psychic power or connection with supreme powers, has had dismal success when playing the stock market, and—like most married people—has been reminded of past errors multiple times.
In addition, for those who have not noticed yet, it is emphasized that the author has slightly pessimistic inclinations—although some would argue it more correct to state that the author suffers from a major pessimistic bias.
Arguably, that negative outlook is sometimes sprinkled with bits of optimism—but with much fewer sprinkles than typically found on a cup-cake, for sure. In fact, the cupcakes in the following chapters are not only sprinkles-deficient, but they also do not have much glazing either.
Hence, before diving into these predictions, some concepts, problems, scenarios, and delusions—and, yes, predictions by others—will be examined, not necessarily in that order.
END OF THE WORLD SYNDROME “End of the world” theories typically have legs because, as P. T. Barnum, founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, supposedly said, “there is a sucker born every minute.” First, the “end of the world” is apparently impossible because the universe, which consists of dust, gases, and other particles—sometimes lumped into planets where, in rare cases, life forms have evolved—has no clear end in sight. Hence, outside the realm of the Avengers universe (or Marvel’s multiverse for the purists), nobody is likely to figure out how to wipe out the entire universe anytime soon. From a more focused navel-gazing perspective, what is more plausible is human extinction, or, in other words, the end of the world as far as humans are concerned—sometimes called “the end of the world as we know it.” In this case, humans only leave behind traces of their past existence— like fossils—while the planet is left to continue circling the sun.
Scenarios describing possible paths toward that outcome abound. A not very original one predicts that this will happen due to a giant asteroid impact, like the one that is blamed for the extinction of dinosaurs—as if featuring humankind in a bad Hollywood remake called “Dinosaurs II, the Extinction Sequel.” Other potential existential threats often mentioned include a massive solar flare creating a cosmic superstorm, a global pandemic due to a vicious virus emerging from the wild or from a biotech experiment gone wild, a string of supervolcano eruptions, global climatic changes, a collapse of the food chain due to the extinction of pollinating bees, global warfare with weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, or biological), or artificial intelligence logically concluding—Terminator-style—that eradicating the human race is the sensible thing to do.
1 Or— why not?—an extraterrestrial invasion by aliens having (spoiler alert) a better resistance to the earth’s pathogens than those in The War of the Worlds, 2 because nobody listened to the prominent scientists who warned everybody that continuing to beam messages into the cosmos is a stupid idea that can only bring the earth to the attention of belligerent alien invaders.3 Second, by its very nature, the end of the world cannot be predicted, except for the fact that the sun will eventually turn into a red giant star on its 12 billionth birthday, expanding to swallow both Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth4—not a pretty sight, and definitely not an event covered by fire insurance policies.
As such, any cataclysmic event—or definite “point-of-noreturn” threshold—pegged to a specific date, or a specific year, can only be bogus. In particular, anything predicted to happen in exactly ten years is fundamentally suspicious.
Any mention of a round number in a prediction of any kind is usually a sure giveaway that the statement is a marketing ploy more than a scientific fact. The ten-year window is frequently used by attention seekers as it has a nice ring to it, sure to attract disciples. There is nothing new to that strategy and it always works for a while, and then backfires spectacularly.
For instance, in 1926, Baily Willis, then president of the Seismological Society of America, frustrated by the lack of interest and inaction of Californians to take the earthquake threat seriously, built on the fact that some newspapers and magazines had misquoted him in stating that he had predicted that an earthquake producing widespread damage in Southern California was to happen within ten years. He co-opted these misquotes, nuancing them by adding likely and probably in his own statements.5 Nobody would have raised an eyebrow if that kind of prediction had been made by an unemployed Joe Schmo who had dunked one too many beers, but this was the president of the Seismological Society of America speaking—a leading scientist from a cathedral of knowledge presumably making such a statement after having sifted through overwhelming evidence. Unfortunately, as it often happens when scientists inadvertently get entangled in politics—behaving like amateurs unskilled in the art of persuasion—that prediction was not anchored in solid scientific evidence.
While the Southern Californians that Willis wanted to wake up from their torpor essentially ignored his prediction, the insurance industry was jolted by it. The industry combined that prediction with its own previous studies to assess the seismic vulnerability of the insured portfolio, and decided to triple earthquake insurance premiums. This was on top of a previous doubling to tripling of premiums that had been spontaneously imposed a few months earlier as a “nervous” reaction to a damaging earthquake in Santa Barbara. Compounding these events, this resulted in earthquake insurance premiums jumping five to ten-fold in a very short time.6 This infuriated many real estate promoters because banks required all commercial projects to have earthquake insurance before issuing a mortgage. Not only did the increased cost of insurance affect the economic viability of new projects, but it raised a concern among developers that it tarnished the reputation of Southern California, making it look like a seismically dangerous place and therefore affecting economic growth in the region. They used their collective political clout to discredit Willis and undermine his prediction, threatening to silence the local seismologists by lobbying politicians to cut off all earthquake research funding, and hiring other geologists to critically review the prediction and expose critical flaws in the seismological theories at the time. Unfortunately for Willis, a major error was found and acknowledged by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. A preliminary survey of the state that had been used to calculate a relative displacement of twenty-four feet between both sides of the San Andreas Fault in Southern California from 1880 to 1923, when recalculated correctly, showed only a movement of five feet. Being off by a factor of five is not a small thing: who would refuse a fivefold increase in salary, or who would want a fivefold increase in taxes? Likewise, the end of the world in fifty years instead of ten years makes a huge difference. With the subtlety and effectiveness of a bull in a china shop, it did not take long for the business community to tarnish Willis’s reputation and credibility, leading him to resign his presidency from the Seismological Society of America, and making other scientists think twice before entering into the political ring.7 On the positive side, Willis’s brash prediction did prompt some members of the business community to recommend that engineers be required to certify the earthquakeresistance of buildings before a mortgage be approved, and swayed others to assemble a group of engineers and contractors tasked to develop over many years a building code intended to achieve earthquake-resistant construction.8 Some would argue that it might have been overly brash, given the state of science a century ago, to make doomsday predictions. Yet, even nowadays, it is hard to resist the temptation and easy to be blinded by results, particularly when the state-of-the-art tools are so powerful. Serious engineers and scientists expertly using supercomputers and highly sophisticated models are fully aware that results obtained are highly sensitive to small variations in the values set for some parameters—often parameters for which it is dif
f icult, when not outright impossible, to obtain reliable values. As shown earlier, the path and point of landfall of a hurricane cannot be predicted with great accuracy, even only a few days in advance. As such, it is blind faith to believe doomsday studies that use even more complicated models—and considering even more input parameters—to pinpoint a D-day exactly ten years in the future. Or, if not blind nor naive, it is political maneuvering.
Trends can be clear and undeniable, the need to take a problem seriously may be undeniable, the urgency to act to reduce a threat may be undeniable, but using hype, fear, and scary predictions to achieve results can be a turn-off and a flawed approach, in spite of best intentions.
History is full of flawed predictions and promises. Many people took to calling World War I “the war to end all wars,” which it not only failed to do,9 but is a striking contradiction in itself—as if claiming that the best way to fight diabetes is to ingest tons of sugar. Considering the scale of destruction wrought by WWI,10 that was a lot of sugar, and—surprise— even more diabetics down the line. Or, for a more positive example, in 1954, the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission proclaimed that nuclear electricity would be so inexpensive to produce that it would be “too cheap to meter.”11 This meant that the cost of the energy itself would be so minuscule that an “all-you-can-eat” approach would be preferable to the bureaucratic costs of metering energy consumption.12 In those days, that contagious giddiness with nuclear energy led other prestigious visionaries to predict that all of the world’s electricity would be generated by nuclear reactors by 2000. Not quite: roughly 10 percent of the world’s electricity nowadays comes from nuclear energy13 and costs are not always competitive with other forms of power generation.14 It is part of the human experience to live through a fair number of doomsday predictions that never materialize and to be worried or scared for a while, only to find out that nothing happened in the end. Therefore, it is only natural and mathematical that younger individuals—due to their shorter life experience—are the ones most stressed and disturbed by doomsday predictions.
Most people thirty years or older will remember that computers across the world had been predicted to crash at midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of 1999, because software written years earlier only considered the last two digits of a year for every date—a practice that had been used to reduce the size (and cost) of file storage.15 As a result, a global catastrophe was to be triggered when computer dates rolled from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 1900, instead of 2000. When that happened, power outages would occur, the banking system would collapse, medical devices would stop working, and planes would fall out of the sky.
16 The “millennium bug” was a legitimate computer glitch, and more than $600 billion was invested worldwide to patch all kinds of software prior to the deadline,17 but many credible scientists and economists were convinced that it could not be fixed in time. Many people stocked up on food, leaving grocery store shelves empty.
18 By New Year’s Eve, all governments were on standby and police officers worldwide were on duty.
And then, nothing. The New Year’s Eve parties continued through the night, undisturbed, and the world lived on for another day—with the usual morning headache for those who drank too much.
The Y2K bug was not a hoax. It was a real software issue that had to be fixed and, fortunately, got fixed, but it received a tremendous amount of media coverage through 1999, making many people expect the worst.19 Thanks to the hard work of computer programmers (the good ones) and engineers, all the major potential problems had been fixed ahead of time,20 in spite of the fact that many firmly believed it could not be done. However, from there on, people who lived through the whole Y2K frenzy became a little bit more skeptical of doomsday predictions. And so it goes with age, one doomsday prediction at a time.
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
Death of a Salesman It is rare to meet someone who does not want to sell you a product offered by their company. “You don’t need it” was the reason given to me.
We had purchased a new home in Ottawa, a region that the National Building Code of Canada clearly identifies as seismically active. Granted that compared to the West Coast, the earthquakes are far and few in between, and smaller, but our house sat on more than 100 feet of clay deposits reminiscent of the Mexico City lakebed and its propensity to amplify seismic waves as they travel to the surface (recall the Jell-O bowl effect mentioned earlier). The region’s contractors that sold starter homes offered standard designs where the only options purchasers could pick were the colors of the carpets and of the outside cladding. It is also the only part of the world where I have seen regular homes (not log cabins) built using a chain-saw, giving a new flavor to the term “cookie-cutter” home. Whatever seismic resistance the house provided was incidental and unquantified.
Insurance was the only way to protect our investment.
Careful reading of the small print revealed that earthquake insurance was not included as part of the standard policy, but that this coverage could be included for a modest additional premium of $15 per year. This is what the insurance salesman did not want to sell me.
“Why would you need that?” he questioned, as if it was surreal to have a customer asking to pay a higher premium.
“I need it.” “Why? The mortgage company does not require it.” “This has nothing to do with the bank,” I replied, followed by a long explanation, as if I had to justify why this was important.
“You are not in California. This is Ottawa. There are no earthquakes here,” he replied. Even though he was most likely not a seismologist, he talked with the assurance of a salesman (British English pun intended).
My response at that point, while not suitable for printing, was convincing enough. The extra $15 per year I paid was worth it, even if I am pleased that no claims related to earthquake-damage were made during that period.


The Silent Heroes
SILENT SUCCESSES When it comes to making changes that will enhance the disaster preparedness and resilience of society, many professionals working in this field came to the conclusion, decades ago, that trying to engage the public to advance this cause was an exhausting and often futile pursuit, much like trying to push water uphill. Grassroots activists and movements have typically invested their limited energy pursuing other priorities. Young and old activists are eager to fight when it comes to immediate social and political matters of justice and rights, such as abortion, immigration, economic injustice, and many other legitimate hot topics, with passionate advocates on both sides of each issue.
Likewise, many will rally to confront global, long-range, existential threats and environmental crises, such as climate change, nuclear energy, war. Multiple organizations exist to marshal this grassroots energy. In comparison, when it comes to lobbying for a safer infrastructure, good luck getting people excited—except when a disaster sparks public outcry, making it suddenly possible to pass measures that had long been waiting in the wings. Such windows of opportunity rarely open, but it pays to be ready.
Thousands of upset people protested and joined the Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing and Old Cola Drinkers of America1—and one went as far as launching a class action lawsuit2—when Coca Cola launched New Coke in 1985, apparently altering the very fabric of the universe by having added a bit more sugar to the recipe of its flagship soft drink.3 These were passionate folks jolted by an overnight crisis. The American Society of Civil Engineers would drown in its own tears of joy if its annual call to invest in fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure generated a smidgen of such passion from the general public, but watching a bridge rust over decades is not an overnight crisis. Evidently, they (and other similar groups) are not deluded by wishful hope. All the silent heroes that have relentlessly endeavored to make society safer against disasters have wised up early on to the fact that public opinion is fickle. As such, they have found ways to improve the state of things without having to wait for public outcry— not always successfully, often moving only a small step at a time, in a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but still— winning small battles, one after another.
To do so, they have sought advocates and supporters in key government agencies, pitching ideas or lobbying for the creation of organizations or commissions with budgets to empower activities toward disaster mitigation. For example, in the late 1960s, many seismologists, architects, engineers, and other experts in San Francisco were frustrated to see rampant development in some areas—such as reclaimed tidal areas along the San Francisco Bay shores—that they believed would make construction more vulnerable to earthquakes, while others argued that specific soil remediation measures, special design considerations, and limiting construction to low-rise buildings would provide adequate seismic safety. As this was being debated, some started to promote the idea of creating a public Bay Area Earthquake Commission that could make recommendations on zoning, land use, and other matters to reduce hazards.
Coincidentally, this happened during a time (mentioned earlier) of profuse apocalyptic predictions by clairvoyants, hippy visionaries, and other eccentrics, all suggesting in different ways that a gigantic earthquake was soon to level California’s cities, leaving millions dead—some of these visions possibly fueled by the consumption of certain chemicals of dubious legality. Amid this frenzy, State Senator Alquist supported a bill (drafted by one of his administrative assistants fascinated by earthquakes who had followed the previous discussions on the proposed Bay Area Earthquake Commission) to establish a State Earthquake Commission. Under the fiscally conservative regime of Governor Reagan, the bill was rapidly killed by the Senate Government Ef
f iciency Committee. However, Alquist
recast the bill as a resolution to establish a joint committee of the legislature, a procedural strategy that made it possible to escape the purview of the Senate Government Ef f iciency Committee as well as to not require the governor’s signature. With a measly operating budget of $5,000, rather than the $100,000 originally intended, the Joint Committee on Seismic Safety was established.4 Thus was born what would eventually become in 1975 the California Seismic Safety Commission, with a sizeable budget and authority, thanks to the 1971 San Fernando earthquake that damaged more than thirty thousand buildings across Los Angeles, disabled expressways due to collapsed bridges, and damaged the crest of a dam that could have flooded eighty thousand residents had the water level been four feet higher at the time of the earthquake.5 Establishment of the Commission is but one example of how seismic safety advocates successfully found access to legislators and got dozens of seismic-safety bills through without having to convince and mobilize a public already tied up fighting other more visible or preoccupying causes.6 Silent heroes also include the hundreds of engineers who have served voluntarily on code and specifications committees to enhance practice—a slow process, but again winning many small battles against the status quo, advancing one step at a time toward structures and systems better performing during earthquakes and other hazards. As a result, much of the infrastructure that is designed and built today is substantially safer than it was in the past.
Much like a new car today with seat belts and airbags is safer than a brand-new Ford Model T a century ago. In parallel, hundreds of scientists (including social scientists) have been proactive in educating the public and key stakeholders on hazards, risks, and ways to make the world safer.
While this book is not about all these silent heroes, as many books in various fields of expertise have been devoted to the topic, it is important to recognize their contributions. Far from working in the spotlight, like Greta Thunberg and other media darlings of this world, they are a community of individuals that moves forward in small steps, overcoming hurdles along a treacherous obstacle course, to get things done for the greater good.
The following section provides one example of some of the challenges that had to be overcome for a single, modest achievement toward the goal of enhancing public safety: preventing people from being killed by showers of bricks.
THE URM OBSTACLE COURSE When silent heroes succeed in making a positive change happen, it is often only after having gone through an obstacle course of considerable length. The obstacles can be technical, political, economic, and much more. It has been mentioned before that unreinforced masonry construction was banned in California following the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that damaged so many buildings of that type. Preventing the construction of damage-prone buildings was definitely a step in the right direction by not adding more problem buildings to the existing inventory, but that did not address the fact there already were thousands of vulnerable unreinforced masonry buildings across the state. There were fifteen thousand of them in Los Angeles County alone.7 The necessity to strengthen these existing buildings was recognized and already expressed at the time.8 For decades, cities were not sure that they had the authority to force private owners to fix these buildings. The problem was also compounded by extended discussions on whether these buildings should be condemned and demolished, or strengthened to some level (with various opinions as to what this level should be), and on how much of a cost burden this would impose on owners.
Then, in 1966, ending a seven-year court battle, the California Supreme Court ruled in a case involving the city of Bakersfield, which had condemned a hotel it considered to be a fire hazard, and the hotel owner who challenged on the basis that the hotel met all of the statutes in effect when it was constructed in 1929. The Supreme Court stated that a city has the right to eliminate an existing danger to the public, and that something considered a danger by current standards needs not be forever tolerated on the basis that it was code-compliant when originally constructed.9 This empowered the city of Long Beach (in Los Angeles County) to move forward and condemn unreinforced masonry buildings, but resistance immediately ensued. Owners of such buildings organized themselves to stop the process, request financial assistance, and seek a more conciliatory approach. Possibly recognizing that demolishing three thousand buildings would also have an impact on the city’s inflow of tax dollars, the city sought expert opinions from consultants, engaged in much deliberations, assessed the economic and financial consequences of various options, dealt with lawsuits, and established more refined approaches and priorities to determine which buildings should be evaluated and repaired or demolished. By 1976, Long Beach had an ordinance by which buildings started to be inspected and rated, albeit at somewhat of a slow pace.10 In nearby Los Angeles, which is a larger city with a more heterogeneous population, stronger special interest groups —and, according to some, a more disjointed decisionmaking process11—the process was even more convoluted.
Shortly after the nearby wake-up call of the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, a 1973 City Council motion launched the process, requesting that the Department of Building and Safety investigate the feasibility of a program to deal with the problems posed by unreinforced masonry buildings, and determine if the Long Beach experience could be implemented in Los Angeles. Then, after years of revised draft ordinances, public hearings, legal advice, citizen protests objecting to proposals to post warning signs on seismically hazardous buildings, pushback from the motion picture industry accusing the city of using this as an excuse to close down theaters that showed sleazy movies, concerns for the loss of housing for the poor, financial planning, discussion on compliance deadlines, setting priorities for different types of building occupancy, research on possible retrofit methods, retrofit cost studies, environmental impact studies, and much more, the City of Los Angles passed a law in 1981 for mitigating the earthquake hazards posed by unreinforced masonry buildings. A mere forty-eight years after the Long Beach earthquake.12 By 2004, of the 8,268 unreinforced masonry buildings targeted by that law, 194 had been exempted, 1,939 demolished, 6,124 retrofitted, and 6 remained to be demolished or retrofitted.13 In that context, it is important to mention that, as a concession to achieve some level of enhancements in public safety while making the cost of seismic retrofit work more palatable, unreinforced masonry buildings have typically been required to be strengthened to resist earthquake forces lower than what is considered the minimum for new buildings. In other words, because of that trade-off, these masonry buildings should be able to survive some earthquakes, but maybe not the larger ones typically considered by buildings codes for new construction. This could make it challenging after a large earthquake to explain to an owner who has invested lots of money to comply with the seismic retrofit law why the bricks that used to be in the building’s walls are now scattered everywhere on the ground. Again, this brings everything back to the world of probabilities— an umbrella can be quite effective during a storm, but less so to protect against a nuclear blast.
ALL THAT FOR NOTHING?
The Swiss do not only like their cheese to be full of holes, but also their underground. At the height of the Cold War, in 1963, Switzerland enacted a law requiring each new home to include a nuclear shelter in its basement. The law specifies the required thickness of the shelter’s reinforced concrete walls, that an armored door must be used, that the rooms must be equipped with a number of special air filters, dry toilets, and bunk beds, and that food supplies must be stocked (including bottled water and dried cheese14—most probably Swiss cheese, although not mandatory). Because the government promised to each citizen a place in an easily reachable shelter, building owners are informed by the law that their private shelters will be not-so-private; it must accommodate other citizens, including members of the Swiss civic protection forces.15 To prevent nuclear-bunker slumlords, inspections of private shelters are conducted every five years to ensure that they are in working condition.16 As an alternative, homeowners were allowed to pay a fee to public authorities, which then embarked on the construction of public shelters on a grand scale. Some of these bunkers were designed as seven-story underground buildings and tunnels to accommodate twenty thousand people, although some of the older facilities were “downgraded” in 2006 to allow only two thousand people17 —presumably to prevent the eruption of “internal wars” over the long run in overcrowded confinement conditions, as friendly neighbors would start to get on each other’s nerves.
By 2006, Switzerland had more than three hundred thousand shelters with a capacity for 8.6 million individuals (equal to 114 percent of the country’s population at the time).18 Although the Cold War was long over by then, the government kept the program alive to provide protection in case of accidental radioactive release at one of the country’s nuclear power plants.
No other country on earth has so heavily invested in nuclear shelters. Sweden and Finland are the runners up, but are only able to shelter 81 percent and 70 percent of their population, respectively19—interestingly, the Swedish government has published online the GIS locations of its public shelters, making the shelter assignment process less secretive (and possibly less orderly during a surprise nuclear attack) than the Swiss.20 Beyond these three, when it comes to providing shelters that can completely protect against radioactive fallout, no other country can cover more than 50 percent of its population—most can hardly protect more than a few percent of their population, like Germany, at 3 percent.21 For the Swiss, constructing and maintaining these shelters has been an expensive endeavor over decades—in the billions of dollars. Fortunately, Switzerland has not been the target of a nuclear attack, nor has it had a nuclear power plant meltdown. Nobody will complain about that.
However, given that the Big Bad Wolf never came, the price tag of the whole operation naturally started to draw attention. As such, in 2011, after nearly fifty years of investments in shelters that never got used, the Swiss parliament decided that it was time to repeal the law. Then, two days later, as the Fukushima nuclear power plant was drowned by a tsunami, the parliament reversed that decision.22
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
Need to Know Switzerland is a wonderful country. As the saying goes, the Alps are amazing, the country runs like clockwork, and the flag is a big plus. It was a pleasure and privilege to enjoy Swiss hospitality for an entire month as a guest of the Zürich Institute of Technology. We lived in a beautiful apartment in the upscale Zürichberg district overlooking Lake Zürich, a thirty-minute walk—and 450 feet change in elevation—from the of
f ice. Easier to stay slim in spite of all
the Swiss chocolate and cheese when going anywhere always requires an uphill climb.
On our street, a few steps from our apartment, was a long narrow park where we never saw anybody play, walk, or picnic. We heard rumors that it might have been a nuclear shelter, but if it was one, it was a well-guarded secret. We never saw a door or a sign to that effect. We spent time online trying to find out where the famous Swiss nuclear shelters were located, but that also is apparently a well-guarded secret. In the event of a nuclear disaster, Switzerland tourists might find themselves being the only ones wandering the streets of Zürich, wondering where everybody else went. Alone above ground in Zürich and glowing-in-the-dark radioactive.

Truth and Lies about Resilience
RESILIENCE EVERYWHERE In the previous millennium (only a few decades ago), “resilience” was an obscure term to most people, used by scientists, such as physicists,1 ecologists,2 psychologists, and psychiatrists,3 to describe the ability to recover from deformations, trauma, or stress. Then, in less than a decade, it became a buzzword. In July 2016, Google searches on the word “resilience” returned 47 million “hits” on the internet, an 800 percent increase from six years earlier. In March 2020, it scored 211 million hits—another fivefold increase in less than four years. Eighteen months later, 303 million hits. There are pandemics that do not spread viruses that fast!—although a pandemic actually helped in this case, given that 100 million hits were obtained when searching for resilience and COVID “bundled” together. In fact, “resilience” has become more popular than “Beatles” (only 165 million hits in September 2021), and is catching up to “Christianity” (339 million hits that same month).
Hence, like “cool” and “you know,” people nowadays seem to plug “resilience” into sentences whenever they are too lazy to open the dictionary or a thesaurus. This makes it possible for the Buffalo Bills to get “a resilient effort on defense and on offense” to overcome a fourteen-point deficit at half time and win a game (probably meaning “solid” instead of resilient),4 for a food critic to describe the best chocolate truf
f les as having a resilient shell enclosing
the ganache (possibly meaning “harder”),5 for someone to buy “resilient flooring” (meaning “resistant and durable”),6 and for a car to be called “the most resilient car in the history of sports cars” (if anybody knows what that means).7 The market offers graphic novels, movies, and board games titled “Resilience,” as well as a Resilient wine, a Resilient bourbon whiskey, a Resilient juice, and a Resilience dietary supplement. There is even a cruise ship named Resilient Lady, 8 for being launched after the rough seas of COVID. To put it mildly, the term resilience has evolved in an incredibly elastic manner. Even the US Department of State had a web page providing advice on “Ways to become more resilient,”9 which recommended “laughing” as one item in a long bullet list. Quoting from the website: “Laugh: Even when things seem to be falling apart around you, try to find time to smile and laugh. It is very healing and it will help you forget your worries for a few moments. Rent a movie that makes you laugh or spend time with a friend with a good sense of humor.” (Important note: It is absolutely true that laughing is healthy and has psychological and potential curative benefits, and this is why it is strongly recommended that everybody buy multiple copies of this book as gifts to heal friends and family while making them simultaneously more resilient.) Evidently, there is a new Tower of Babel where everybody talks a different “resilience” language and nobody understands anybody else, but thankfully, there is still a rock-solid place where words have specific and clear meanings: the dictionary. Even though definitions vary slightly from one dictionary to the other, all of them agree that resilience is essentially and fundamentally the quality of being able to return quickly to a previous good condition after problems have occurred. To “spring back” and “recover” from all kinds of stuff (physical properties, illnesses, misfortune, etc.), back to “normal.” The faster the recovery, the more resilient. Of course, deeper dives from the normal usually entail longer recoveries too, and thus less resilience.
As such, when referring to anything as being resilient, there first has to be a “baseline” that defines some original condition, as a starting point before—it being the topic of interest here—a disaster. Second, there has to be something measurable that is lost and to be recovered, or, in other words, a specific drop of “functionality” at the onset (which can be quite sudden in the case of an earthquake) gained back over time as things are repaired and return to normal.
This functionality can be the number of customers having power, gas, or water; or the waiting time in emergency conditions compared to waiting time in normal conditions when dealing with transportation, distribution of goods, and emergency room operations; or any other measure.
Therefore, quantification of resilience must be able to address both the loss of this functionality, and the path of this recovery of functionality both in time and space.10 Without quantification, there is always what could be called wishful resilience, or aspirational resilience—meaning things done with the best of intentions to provide some tangible enhancement in resilience, but with a lot more hand waving than math.
THE “JUST IN TIME” STRAW HOUSE OF MODERN COMMERCE Like every other country, Canada has had its share of disasters. However, beyond floods, blizzards, wildfires, tsunamis, train wrecks, and other messes,11 the most devastating national catastrophes occurred when the country failed to win the gold medal in hockey at the Winter Olympics. The women’s team won gold in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014, and the men’s team won in 2002, 2010, and 2014. In 2018, disaster struck: they only won silver and bronze, respectively.
12 The country raked in its largest number of Winter Olympics medal ever that year (29) only bested by Norway (39) and Germany (31), but the entire citizenry would have readily traded all those curling, bobsledding, snowboarding, luge, skating, and skiing medals for the only one that really counts in the country that claims to have invented hockey. The country where, in the process of creating the game, prosperous companies that manufactured hockey equipment were also established, including CCM (founded in 1899)13 and Bauer (founded in 1927).14 In early 2020, beyond the Olympic losses, the national sport faced another major crisis: the players of the National Hockey League risked running out of hockey sticks because 75 percent of the sticks they use are manufactured in China, where everything had shut down in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak—including the CCM and Bauer Chinese factories.15 The remaining 25 percent of hockey sticks used by NHL players are manufactured in Mexico.
16 Apparently, national pride only goes so far.
In the name of optimizing efficiency and profits, the trend over the past decades has been to configure operations to minimize costs. Inventories that, by definition, consist of stuff piled up in warehouses while awaiting to be used, were replaced by “just in time” manufacturing to eliminate the “waste from overproduction and inventory.”17 As in a well-timed choreography, suppliers scattered all over the map adjust their production and shipping schedules such that every part needed to assemble a product arrives at the plant—as the name says—just in time. Where some manufacturers used to keep enough material in warehouses to feed their assembly lines for one or two months, the norm nowadays is down to a few days. This has combined with globalization, which in essence has been a global search for the cheapest labor on the planet. As a result, much of the world’s manufacturing has ended-up concentrated in a few countries, China and Mexico being two of the most popular among many.
In other words, in the span of a few decades, the world has reconfigured itself into “lean and mean” manufacturing supply chains to successfully maximize profits. At the same time, the most efficient systems are also often the most “fragile,” as they lack the ability to adjust to sudden disturbances. A world that depends on fragile systems may be in equilibrium and quite prosperous when everything runs like clockwork, but the day that something happens to disrupt the existing momentum, the systems break down. In other words, a highly efficient world that operates without redundancy is a more unstable world—a less resilient world.
A disaster striking an industrialized region not only can shut down its economic activity for a long time but also disable its shipping activities. As mentioned earlier, the 1995 Kobe earthquake destroyed the city’s port, which at the time was the sixth-largest container port in the world and accounted for 39 percent of the city’s industrial activity.
18 Other major industries affected by that earthquake included Kobe Steel Ltd (a major steel producer that lost roughly $1 billion in the process), shoe factories, and sake breweries, which suffered major damage. It took two years to rebuild the port and three years to remove all the earthquake debris from Kobe. Most industries eventually recovered, but some took longer than others to do so. By 2007, shoe production was still only 80 percent of what it was in 1994; the sake industry had recovered to 40 percent of its 1994 production.19 However, because this all happened before the globalization frenzy had reached today’s peaks, the international impact was not too significant.
Skipping ahead twenty-five years, when the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked the world’s economy for a while, provides a glimpse of how a disaster can send ripples across the world’s fragile supply chains, leaving many firms scrambling to find alternative suppliers. Only a glimpse, because much worse global disturbance is possible. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as the entire Western civilization shut down at the same time, the demand for many goods and products that are not essential in a public health emergency collapsed at the same time, reducing the pressure on the corresponding supply chains. There was a huge increase in demand for masks, ventilators, and— strangely—toilet paper, but few rushed to purchase SUVs, skis, sea-doos, jeans, cell phones, and so on. Imagine a different scenario, in which the world learned of the virus outbreak right from the start and decided to curtail all trade and travel with China to force the entire country into confinement—a China forced into quarantine to protect the rest of the world, leaving it to cough on itself without contaminating the rest of the planet. Imagine if the virus had overwhelmed China and spread over the entire country.
It would not have been business as usual in the rest of the world, because China’s shutdown would have cut the supply chains of most companies.
In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the world by doubling the salary of his autoworkers. While he did it as a strategy to reduce horrible problems of absenteeism and staff turnover on his assembly line, beyond the positive surge in productivity that it created overnight, it also made it possible for Ford’s employees to purchase the very cars they were assembling.20 As an accidental byproduct, it provided the middle-class with more disposable income, which in turn, boosted the economy as a whole.21 A century later, as if getting dizzy at an open bar that served stock options, CEOs closed one plant after the other, moving production offshore to reduce production costs and sell their products cheaper to undercut the competition. As many of the laid-off people became poorer, all they could afford were cheaper goods, which in turn led to more plants moving offshore to produce the goods they could afford, and so on.
All in a downward spiral decimating the manufacturing sector, trading the inconvenient lessons of Henry Ford for multimillion-dollar bonuses in the (possibly offshore) accounts of some CEOs.
Over the years, one iconic brand after another has moved its production lines offshore to cut production costs and sell at lower prices. Fisher Price toys, once produced in Buffalo, New York, are now made somewhere in China.
Mattel’s Barbie and Hasbro’s G.I. Joe, Black & Decker’s tools, Dell computers, the Etch A Sketch, Rawlings’ baseballs (for America’s very own pastime), Levi’s jeans—all produced in China.22 Certainly not because manufacturing was of better quality there. If anything, even though 80 percent of the world’s toys were manufactured in China by 2007, millions of toys have been recalled over the years because they were dangerously malfunctioning, coated in lead paint, or defective for some other reason.23 Hence, it had to be all about—and only about—cheap labor.
Today, China has a near total stranglehold on the production of some goods, including some strategic products. For example, the pharmaceutical ingredients used in thousands of generic medicines are only produced in China.24 To list a few well-known products, China produces 95 percent of the ibuprofen (as in Advil), 91 percent of the hydrocortisone, 80 percent of the antibiotics, and 70 percent of the acetaminophen (as in Tylenol) used in the United States.25 When it comes to the rare earth minerals used to manufacture electronics, radars, and other high-tech gadgets that the military needs for warfare nowadays, a 2017 report from the USGS indicated that none were produced nationally, while China produced 81 percent of the world’s supply.
26 To those paid to contemplate possible war scenarios, this does not bode well. Most significantly, nothing prevents the Chinese from using this manufacturing strength to their advantage to create disasters worldwide, which they could easily do by shipping defective hockey sticks to all other countries, propelling China’s ice hockey team to Olympic gold. As past Olympic Games have shown, there is no ethics when it comes to winning medals—or to winning any other war for that matter.
Today it is China, tomorrow it may be another more or less corrupt country. The point is, simply put, that as a result of globalization, most nations have lost their self-reliance. In the end, in the post COVID-19 world, after years or decades, organizations hopefully will find a new equilibrium—as it often takes a disaster to trigger changes. However, in that process, it is hoped that the legacy of the pandemic will be a renewed appreciation for the value of redundancy in supply chains, and for the tangible resilience that can be provided by strong and dependable domestic manufacturing capabilities.
RESILIENCE FOR ALL Wanting resilience is all well and good, but there are some hurdles.
First, like the absence of consensus among the Three Little Pigs as to what type of hut it is best to build—at least until the Big Bad Wolf shows up—when it comes to earthquakes or any other hazard, most people do not care about resilience. Until the day a disaster occurs. This is largely because if someone spends dollars today to reduce damage later, therefore enhancing resilience by being better prepared, that person will only benefit from that investment if an extreme event occurs in his/her lifetime. In other words, even when fully aware of the risks of inaction, some folks will prefer to bet that the disaster will not occur in their lifetime, freeing that money for other pursuits that will provide immediate rewards instead. That being said, for the other folks ready to invest today to help them achieve disaster resilience, the inaction of others creates a problem: a resilient building surrounded by non-resilient buildings may not be resilient after all. Like nonsmokers who can get cancer sitting every day in smoke-filled restaurants, one cannot achieve resilience alone. Isolated islands of resilience are not enough to achieve success. Resilience is a team sport. Some stars may shine bright, but in most team sports—as accurately demonstrated by multiple Goofy cartoons—one or two highly paid stars surrounded by a bunch of losers does not make a championship team. Nor a resilient community.
Second, as mentioned earlier, building codes contain minimum design requirements only intended to ensure “life safety,” which is good but not sufficient if the intent is to achieve resilience. The consequences of this design philosophy are generally not well communicated to the public—recall the car-crash versus Sherman tank analogy presented earlier.
When the Big Bad Wolf shows up, the balance tips for a while. As mentioned earlier, after the Christchurch earthquake, most of the buildings in the city’s Central Business District were demolished and the area underwent a massive rebuilding effort that spanned more than a decade.
Interestingly, among the ensemble of new buildings that have arisen as a result of the reconstruction process, most have very different structural systems than what was the norm prior to the earthquake. Partly consciously, partly unconsciously, much of Christchurch is being reconstructed with more resilient structural systems that will allow a more rapid return to functionality following future earthquakes, without necessarily incurring higher initial cost.27 Third, emotions can also drive decisions. For example, a major debate raged for years on what to do with the heavily damaged Christchurch cathedral. After the Canterbury bishop, with support from dozens of other local Christchurch churches and Christian groups,28 announced that the badly damaged cathedral would be demolished, petitions and lawsuits by groups of parishioners stopped and stalled the process. Eventually, after more than seven years of backand-forth arguments, it was decided to restore the cathedral, keeping the same stone masonry it was originally built from, because a big stone cathedral is also a big emotional symbol.29 Some would have been happy to restore the cathedral to a lesser level of seismic resistance than required for new buildings30 (to hell with resilience), recreating the grandeur but prone to damage in a future earthquake. In the end, common sense prevailed. The reinstated cathedral will be sitting on a new foundation designed to isolate it from ground shaking (using a technology known as base isolation31), and a reinforced concrete and steel framing system will be embedded into the stone walls that survived the earthquake.32 The final product, at more than $150 million, and to be completed more than fifteen years after the earthquake,33 will look almost like the original heritage building, but more resilient.34
BLIND RESILIENCE As mentioned earlier, resilience involves both a loss and a recovery. Unfortunately, when seeking ways to enhance resilience, some folks tend to focus only on the recovery part. This is all well intentioned, but if the deficiencies that can cause losses in the first place are fixed before the extreme event, there will not be a disaster. Alternatively, if losses cannot be prevented but actions can be taken to reduce them significantly in a future disaster, recovery will be faster and things will also be more resilient. This is common sense. Yet, when it comes to proactively mitigating the vulnerability of the infrastructure, which means both enhancing design standards to make new construction more resilient from the starting point, or bringing the existing infrastructure up to the current standards (or close), it is often said to be “too expensive.” This begs the question: “Too expensive compared to what?” To doing nothing instead ($0), or to the war in Afghanistan ($2.26 trillion)?35 Or to paying the bill after the disaster happens? In the latter case, cost-benefit studies have repeatedly shown that investing $1 upfront saves on average $6 down the line ($4 for earthquakes, more than that for other hazards, and up to $13 in some circumstances).36 The math is clear, but money upfront is always stressful. Furthermore, when money is tight, not everything can be made resilient—and since money is always very tight, this leaves people arguing on priorities for the little bit that can be done at any point in time. With odd arguments at times.
Yet, like it or not, while enhancing the capacity to respond and recover following a disaster is good, it is absolutely better to mitigate the vulnerability of the infrastructure in the first place, to reduce possible loss of functionality right at the outset. In other words, a fast response and recovery help make a nation more disaster resilient, but only mitigation can eliminate the massive initial losses that make it a disaster in the first place.
Without mitigation, communities and countries can get stuck in an endless cycle of destruction and reconstruction.
What is somewhat unfortunate is that the resilience concept has appealed to many stakeholders who should have invested in mitigation but who did not want to do so, giving them a way to cop-out by investing instead on cheaper measures that are claimed to achieve a more rapid recovery following a disaster. Arguably, planning ahead of time to develop a network that will make it possible to expeditiously dispatch water bottles to a disaster area is a good thing, but nowhere as good as preventing that area’s grocery store from collapsing during an extreme event in the first place. Preventing losses seems wiser, even if more expensive—particularly if the Big Bad Wolf does come.
RESILIENCE FROM SCRATCH Given that it is expensive to strengthen the existing infrastructure and that mitigation dollars are limited, many researchers and policy makers have argued that efforts at making communities more resilient should focus on the critical infrastructure that would need to be operational after an extreme event, such as the water network, the power grid, and hospitals. At first look, it sounds logical. These are essential services that form the “backbone” of a functioning community. In particular, fully functional hospitals are needed after a disaster to provide emergency care for injured victims. Water is crucial, as humans typically get very low mileage without it. And almost everything in a modern society needs electricity to be functional. Therefore, the continued operation (or rapid restoration) of these services is a necessary condition for overall community resilience, and investments to upgrade their ability to remain operational through extreme events is wise. In fact, the general public is often shocked to discover that these critical facilities and networks often fail, making a disaster worse. Yet, this should not be surprising given that much of this critical infrastructure was built in an era when things were generally not designed to survive extreme events— meaning that, without upgrades, they will perform like the rest of the infrastructure (which means, not great). It will take many decades to make these critical infrastructures resilient, because costs need to be spread over time.
While making key lifelines more resilient is essential, and good, and valuable, expecting that this alone will make a community resilient is being overly optimistic. For example, after the Christchurch earthquake, the hospitals were functional, and the Central Business District remained serviced by water and power and was accessible even though a few damaged bridges were closed. Yet, given the fencing of the District, the demolition of more than a thousand buildings there, and reconstruction taking more than a decade, one can hardly say that Christchurch was resilient—at least, per the real dictionary definition. This suggests that for a community to be truly resilient, its buildings must also be resilient. Pursuing the goal of community resilience without doing anything about the inventory of existing buildings, while well intentioned, is like increasing the speed limit on a road full of gigantic potholes in hope of reducing the time it takes to reach destination in a world where people drive with a bag on their head.
Unfortunately, achieving resilient buildings is not easy.
First, as mentioned earlier, for the foreseeable future, building codes are likely to remain minimum requirements intended to ensure life safety. Second, buildings in a community are owned by different owners, who can have different views and opinions on just about anything, from sports to politics, including preparedness to disasters—a problem compounded by the fact that most people do not know much about hazards, disasters, or why they should want resilient buildings in the first place (“Isn’t the building code taking care of that already?”). In that perspective, it is commendable that some organizations have developed resiliency rating systems, similar to the rating systems that are being used to highlight the environmental and health impact for green buildings.37 A resiliency rating can be established by assessing how much damage the building is likely to suffer during an extreme event, and the time it will take to repair it and return it to full functionality. Some critics may worry that awarding a building the top resilience rating may lead its owner to believe that an ironclad protection is guaranteed, missing the point that resilience is a complex issue broader than individual buildings, but anything that voluntarily engages owners in discussion on hazards and resilience can only be seen as a good initiative.
However, irrespective of whether resilience is to be achieved by optional ratings or mandated by future buildings codes, it remains that achieving community resilience “one building at a time” will take a long time—for new as well as for existing buildings. It may also be pointless until all buildings in the same district become equally resilient. For example, a highly resilient building may be destroyed if its roof is punched through by a massive shower of bricks from the not-so-resilient neighbor.
Or, as in the case of Christchurch, a building surviving intact will still not bring any income if the neighborhood is shut down for months. Again, it will take many decades to meet this overwhelming challenge.
What else could be done to achieve resilient communities?
There is always the option of building new resilient cities, from scratch. Not only resilient buildings—because community resilience requires more than only resilient buildings—but entire self-contained resilient districts. New communities of resilient buildings, having their own independent emergency backup power generation, their own resilient bridges and resilient transportation network, their own waste-treatment and water-purification capabilities, their own hospital—and presumably their own security forces (moats and walls optional) to prevent looting by residents from the non-resilient neighboring towns after an extreme event, at least until all towns move into the resilient age.
The resilient city concept may seem as crazy today as the thought of sending someone to the moon was a century ago, but it may not be so crazy. The proposed “resilient building district” can be thought of as a “Resilient EPCOT,” by analogy to Walt Disney’s original Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), referring here to EPCOT the living community, and not EPCOT the theme park. Not the Goofy kind of EPCOT—the real deal. Most people only know the EPCOT that got built in Florida, but Walt Disney’s original plan was actually an entire urban planning concept.38 It was a prototype community to be built from scratch, in a ring-like layout, with a central high-density urban center, surrounded by an industrial area, a residential green belt, and a commercial zone, with its own airport (for a future world filled with hundreds of small commercial airlines needing only short runways), and everything it needed to be self-reliant. Disney envisioned it to be the model “city of tomorrow” relying on (and showcasing) the country’s latest technologies.39 However, Disney died in 1966 and while some of the ideas from the original vision were implemented, the prototype city did not get built and EPCOT became something else.
A Resilient EPCOT would somewhat resurrect the idea, admittedly different but built to be highly resilient, meaning that on top of every new technology likely to be embedded in a new city from scratch, all of its systems and buildings would be able to most rapidly (or maybe even immediately) return to be fully functional after an extreme event. The flaw in this concept is that “living on an island” is not possible because a disaster in a foreign country can have ripple effects on the world’s globally integrated economy, but a resilient island is still better than no resilient island.
Critics will argue that this unorthodox idea reeks of elitism, but at the same time, it could be viewed as a necessary step toward model cities of the future. Just like power windows, once only offered in luxury cars like Cadillacs and Lincolns, have become ubiquitous nowadays— very few automakers still offer models with hand crank windows, and possibly even fewer young drivers will lower their window when seeing the “classic” rotary hand-gesture requesting it.
In any event, those who do not like the Resilient-EPCOT idea can always follow the advice from the State Department to be more resilient. In the meantime, new cities are being built from the ground up across the world,40 and China is already on track to build many of those to be as high-tech and futuristic as possible,41 such as with Chengdu Future Science and Technology City.
42 It is unknown how many of these new cities of tomorrow will be disaster resilient.
THE FLAWED THEORY Somewhat related to the concept of rebounding following a disaster, serious studies have shown that some business sectors thrive following a disaster and that the consequences of a disaster are therefore nowhere as severe as computation of losses leads us to believe. In other words, because the construction industry sees a boom due to the need to reconstruct and repair the infrastructure that has suffered damage, it sort of makes up for the fact that others have lost their home and possibly their job—if not their loved ones. The corollary to that observation is that governments should not worry about disasters because, from an actuarial perspective, it has little impact on the balance sheet, and it does not break the bank. It is like an infrastructure stimulus package, but unplanned.
Maybe true and logical to some degree. Yet, as titillating as this concept could be to those with an MBA or a PhD in economics, thinking in those terms is not like resilience on steroids, pumping up the economy. Rather, it simply amounts to robbing Paul to pay Peter—in polite terms, that is, although less polite terms would be also appropriate to describe this theory. If moving the dollars from one column to the other in the spreadsheet does not matter to an accountant, it makes a hell of a difference to those in the losing column.
The absurdity of the whole argument emergences when following the theory to its extreme. If there was any logic to the argument that a disaster has a positive impact on economic activity, then the next time the country enters in a recession, all that would be needed to restart the economy is to flatten some cities here and there. The next time the Dow Jones dives by 20 percent, order the Air Force to drop a few thousand bombs on Manhattan, and let the reconstruction frenzy push the stock market through the roof. Think of the many new jobs created during the rebuilding—and the squeaky clean, brand-new, modernized Manhattan that all will get to enjoy in the end. Sure, it would inconvenience those living in hotels or with friends and family, waiting for the insurance company (if they had insurance) to process the claim for their lost home and then for their new home to be rebuilt, but how could these folks not possibly say, “It was all worth it, we would do it all over again anytime”?
Nonsense.
It is true though that there will be winners after any disaster. It is true that disasters are good for some sectors of the economy, such as the construction industry and material suppliers—or the scoundrels who sell facemasks at exorbitant markups during pandemics—but it does not mean that nothing should be done to prevent disasters. Like it is true that oncologists make a fortune treating cancer patients, it does not mean that nothing should be done to prevent cancer. Along with the winners, there are the losers —and, in disasters as is any poker game, there tend to be more losers than winners, no matter how big the pot is for whoever cashes in.
Another flaw of this theory lies in the fact that, contrary to what could be intuitively expected at first, contractors do not necessarily flock to disaster areas. First, repairs and reconstruction require materials, and many suppliers cannot meet the surge in demand needed for these post-disaster activities. The rush on supplies can rapidly deplete local and regional inventories, and it takes a while for the industry to replenish the stocks. In fact, even in regions undergoing a construction boom—without help from any disaster—it already can take months for builders to get all the concrete blocks, tiles, timber, roof shingles, and other parts they need. Second, many subcontractors get their work on the strength of the relationships that they develop with a few prime contractors that are generally pleased with their work. A subcontractor that has worked hard to establish this network of solid relationships has little to gain to move overnight to another region only because some postdisaster opportunities have been created there—unless that subcontractor had, from the onset, a latent desire to relocate there in the first place. There may be massive needs for certain trades and skills in the disaster area, but rebuilding a network of relationships takes time. Selling services door to door may be lucrative for a while in the immediate post-disaster climate, but it cannot replace the long-term benefit of having a constant volume of work that comes with the trust of a prime contractor. Likewise, a prime contractor moving to the disaster area has to build from scratch new subcontractor relationships, and hiring subs by trial and error is fraught with risk.
Furthermore, things never move as fast as they should when it comes to massive reconstruction, particularly with respect to public-owned infrastructure. After a disaster—no differently than at any other times for that matter— everybody has an opinion. This means that in some democracies, the population—and every special interest group—has to be consulted to make sure that the reconstructed city will have all the state-of-the-art features that can be dreamed up. Bicycle paths everywhere, parks and flowers everywhere, free Wi-Fi for everybody, striking architecture, fresh-air and sunshine in all public places, world-class retail areas, a top-of-the-line transit system, new hospitals, a state-of-the-art convention center, and a performing arts center—oh, and a big sport stadium too.
43 Politicians eager to revive the region’s economy will overpromise full reconstruction and a return to “normal” in record time, because it is urgently needed. Then, recovery funding does not quite add up to what was promised, budget constraints require adjustments, schedules slip, and what was to be accomplished in a few years ends up taking decades. Following that pattern, Christchurch’s ambitious rebuilding plan after the 2011 earthquake was originally projected to be completed in five years, but some landmark pieces of the plan were not complete by 2021, and might not be completed by 2031 either—in spite of the fact that parts of the plan were scaled back.44 No turmoil happens without bruises. All of this adds up to an already severe emotional toll.
The stages of that stressful roller coaster ride are painful.
The anxiety of watching a hurricane approach or floodwater rise, the guilt from not having heeded the warnings, the sense of vulnerability, the fear of the outcome. The shock facing the losses, the confusion, the disbelief, the anger. The temporary upswing and adrenaline buzz for those playing hero or helping their community. The optimism that all will return to normal soon, only to be crushed by reality that this will not be case. The disillusionment that follows and that translates in exhaustion and a feeling of abandonment—and substance abuse or suicide for some. And then—and only then—the long, long, long reconstruction phase, with all of its own emotional ups and downs through the process of rebuilding both the broken infrastructure and the broken lives, while adjusting to the new “normal.” Hence, as great as it might look on the spreadsheet of financial geniuses and economics experts, it is best not to drop bombs on Manhattan during the next recession. Even though generals might be delighted to help (to prove that the doctrine of solving problems by generous bombing campaigns is sound, even though that did not work for volcanos), there are better ways to stimulate the economy.
Waiting for a disaster to happen is not one of them.
ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
Resilience Is Not a Joke I will confess to having contributed to the spread of the resilience “virus,” not by being the “patient zero” who unleashed the word “resilience” onto the world, but certainly for having coauthored a seminal paper that provided a framework to establish the field of disaster resilience.45 Little did I know at the time that “resilience” would become like a pair of one-size-fits-all stretch pants that poorly fit most people. To some degree though, it should have been foreseeable. Researchers who “follow the money” are notorious for repackaging their work to make it fit the buzzword of the day, be it innovative, transformative, sustainable, resilient, collaborative, convergent, or “whatever-else” research. If the hot topic of the day for a granting agency becomes disaster resilience, a researcher who has spent a lifetime studying the sex life of ants will inevitably submit a proposal to study the effects of disasters on the sex-resilience of ants.
When it comes to qualifiers, those who dare call a spade a spade deserve the upmost respect.
During post-earthquake reconnaissance activities in Christchurch’s Central Business District, which was an urban area closed to all unauthorized personnel, I was performing earthquake reconnaissance activities with colleagues from the University of Canterbury and professional engineers from Christchurch. An earthquake reconnaissance activity consists of surveying the state of damage to various structures—in this case, buildings—to identify conditions that have led to this damage. It a rewarding activity, but a grim one.
We were walking in the ghost town that Christchurch downtown had become, with debris in the street and surrounded by damaged buildings, when someone tapped us on the shoulder. Turning around, we found ourselves face-to-face with a clown—red nose, honker, and all, but in a doctor’s white coat. We had run into a member of the Clown Doctors of New Zealand organization,46 whose mission at the time was to relieve the stress of the individuals involved in performing building safety assessments and emergency stabilizations.
The organization website at the time explained that their silly clowning, throughout a depressing post-earthquake Christchurch filled with grief and sadness, provided relief and hope by giving people the permission to laugh in circumstances where it would otherwise not be possible.
Given the recognized power of humor in healing, Clown Doctors endeavored to raise the community’s morale.
Thank you, Clown Doctors, for being wise enough to call it “laughing,” not “resilience.”

Dollars Are Frequent Flyer
Miles
IMAGINARY WORTH A few decades ago, someone came up with the brilliant concept that if a butt is on the seat of a commercial airline, as long as this seat is airborne, the owner of that butt earns one point per mile traveled. The promise made was that a massive amount of accumulated points could eventually be exchanged against free plane tickets. The novelty in the idea lay essentially in adapting to the airline industry a structured marketing strategy that had existed for decades, going back as far as 18961 when supermarkets, gas stations, and stores started to issue trading stamps.2 These stamps could be collected and glued on the pages of specially designed little booklets, up to the point when massive quantities of stamps could be redeemed in exchange for goods from the company that issued them. This became extremely popular in the 1960s when more trading stamps were printed in a given year than legitimate stamps by the U.S. Postal Service.3 These were the first customer loyalty programs.
Nowadays, nearly every retail chain, movie theatre network, supermarket, pharmacy, hotel brand, car rental company, cruise ship line, gasoline company, credit card, and mom and pop operation, has some sort of loyalty program.4 These programs are so common that merely listing them in bullet form would fill a book—albeit a boring one. Cutting and pasting all their rules and regulations would create an encyclopedia—an even more boring book.
Not surprisingly, hardly anybody ever reads these rules and regulations, except evidently those who create them—and therein lies the catch.
Coming back to the airline industry, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when the fear of terrorists kept many people off airplane seats, many airlines bled billions of dollars. One after the other, from 2002 to 2005, United Airlines, US Airways, Northwest Airlines, and Delta Airlines were on the edge of bankruptcy and filed5 under “Chapter 11” of the U.S. Bankruptcy Law to get protection from creditors while attempting to re-organize.6 With layoffs and cuts to employee salaries and pension plans,7 they returned to profit by 2006, in time to face the historical spike in oil prices and the global financial crisis of 2008.8 Airlines returned in the red. Delta and Northwest Airlines merged in 2008, followed by United and Continental Airlines who did the same in 2010.9 American Airlines filed for Chapter 11 in 2011, and then merged with US Airways in 2013. Which brings everything back to Loyalty Programs, as these had to be merged too.
When United and Continental Airlines merged their MileagePlus and OnePass programs, many frequent flyers felt that their benefits had been devaluated, in many ways.10 A disgruntled MileagePlus million-miler went as far as suing the airline for breach of contract, stating in the submitted class-action court filing that, “in stark contrast to the gutting of promised and bargained-for benefits for Million Milers, the new MileagePlus Program perversely and arbitrarily rewards former members of Continental Airlines’ former Continental One Pass frequent flier program.”11 The argument was that, prior to the merger, the MileagePlus program had pledged to all customers who had demonstrated their allegiance to United by having their sore derrière flown over a million miles in United’s planes, that they would receive “guaranteed Lifetime Premier Executive status for life,”12 which came with a bunch of neat perks. By contrast, customers with Continental had also amassed massive quantities of points that would count toward their frequent flyer status, but they had apparently been able to do so in a number of ways, including without actually flying those miles. It was also alleged that benefits had been debased to the disadvantage of MileagePlus members. A federal judge dismissed the class action, on the basis that the rules of the frequent flyer program allowed United “to terminate the Program, or to change the Program Rules, regulations, benefits, conditions of participation, or mileage levels, in whole or in part, at any time with or without notice” as well as to “withdraw, limit, modify or cancel any award.”13 In other words, promises made need not be kept when it comes to Loyalty Programs.14 It is all there in the small print.
Of course, who is going to cry when elite members of the jet set lose some of their freebees and perks? Certainly not those who rarely set foot in an airplane, nor those who get shafted in ways that more substantially and dramatically affect their lives.15 However, the crucial take-away message from the outcome of this class action lawsuit is that when it comes to currency—any currency—those who make the rules of the game control the game, and can change these rules as they wish.
Some would counter that points and miles from frequent flyer programs are arbitrary, hollow currencies dispensed at the will of the organizations that have created them, that they have no real value, and that they should not be considered a currency. Part of the confusion is created by the fact that the IRS has issued a statement that it “has not pursued a tax enforcement program with respect to promotional benefits such as frequent flyer miles.”16 This is partly because the IRS is at a loss to figure out what these miles are worth, which is a problem severely exacerbated by the fact that some people never cash in those miles, and the fact that the value of those miles depreciates nearly every time the airlines change the rules of their frequentflyer programs.17 In fact, if an airline decided to shut down its frequent flyer program overnight, the points would become worthless; in fact, on some airlines, the points that have been banked with their frequent flyer program are set to automatically expire unless at least one flight is taken over a certain time period. To the IRS, this makes them look more like a rebate that must be used by a certain date rather than a currency—which is a confusion appreciated by most business people who are prime benefactors of these programs. However, the counterargument is that points and miles are a currency,18 because they are a medium of exchange that has a specific value and unit system (accounting for relative worth) that stores value for a deferred payment. They are backed by the issuer of the currency, just like the bank notes that were considered legal tender in the era of “free banking” before central banks took over the system because too many banks failed due to lack of liquidity or due to the shoddy practices of “Wildcat” banks.19 The common denominator of all currencies is that it is nothing more than a promise made by the issuer of the currency. The stability of the currency rests entirely on the faith that when the piece of paper—or virtual number in today’s digital age—will be redeemed, it will be worth its face value. The fool’s gold in that precept is that the actual value of a currency rests entirely on the collective imaginary construct that the promise is believable, and thus reliable.
As for all promises in life, short-term promises are always more credible than long-term ones. As far as immediate transactions are concerned, the currency serves its purpose, but when looking far on the horizon, those who make the rules of the game can easily change them by devaluing the currency. This is no different from what is commonly done with frequent-flyer miles. In the end, after devaluation, the number of points (or dollars) in everybody’s account remains the same, but it buys a lot less. Everybody is upset, but those in charge can always blame someone else—and laugh all the way to the bank, as long as that bank uses a different currency.
Any currency is essentially a high-wire act where all the spectators have a stake in not seeing the performer fall and crash. Yet, statistically, over time, it happens. In plain view.
It is easy for anyone to write a bunch of IOUs when there is no genuine interest in repaying the debts. Arguably, that is why accumulating debt is not a concern for many governments: All that is needed to pay it back is to print massive amounts of paper money. It will not be worth much, but it will make it possible to pay back the amount promised at the currency face value. If that were to happen to the dollar, few US citizens would cry when the foreign interests who own 30 percent of the US Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities20 found themselves owning worthless dollars.
However, most of these same citizens would be devastated to find out that the part of their retirement funds invested in trust of the government has vanished.
Printing tons of money is certainly an effective way to erase all debts contracted in a certain currency—as the Argentinian government did in 1992 when it could not find any other lender willing to loan at reasonable interest rates, thereby devaluating its peso by a factor of 100 billion from its previous value.21 With that kind of hyperinflation, a trillion-dollar IOU is effectively paid back with ten dollars of real value. However, to be clear, nothing pretty happens with this solution. While it can be thought of as the nuclear option of debt abatement, it should be clear that it is like dropping the bomb on one’s own economic system. Those who decide to self-inflict such pain better have a sound reconstruction plan to create confidence in the new currency—and likely, in the new government—or have a plan to operate with someone else’s currency while awaiting better days. The German papiermarks became worthless after the First World War, down to a low of 4.2 trillion German papiermarks per US dollar in 1923,22 and everybody knows where that crisis eventually led.
It is dramatic and disheartening to witness the total collapse of a currency from a “shit-hole country”—to use a technical term coined by a famous president. It is an ugly situation that causes widespread misery. However, while it is possible for the International Monetary Fund to strong-arm countries plagued by hyperinflation, walking in after a mini bloodbath to clean up the mess, nobody has the capacity to come to the rescue of big players shooting themselves in a mega bloodbath. On the global scale, the total collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar due to an annual inflation of 89.7 sextillion percent (8.97 × 1022 percent),23 or the Yugoslavian dinar (annual inflation of 5 × 1015 percent), or the Hungarian pengő (annual inflation of 41.9×1015 percent), were all small “earthquakes.” The big earthquakes are the ones that will be devastating on a global scale.
If it takes a disaster for things to change, what are the blessings of disaster in this case? How can surviving a monetary disaster be good for anyone? Of course, being a survivor is already a small win in itself. Also, when almost everybody suffers losses, no matter how terrible the event that occurs, some will come through unscathed. Even the most horrible Ponzi schemes that have dispossessed hundreds of people of their lifetime savings have made a few winners who bailed out before the pyramids collapsed.
However, for the unlucky survivors, when complex structures and highly fragile financial structures collapse, sucking hapless souls into the maelstrom, what remains is an opportunity to create a new order cleansed of deviant financial practices, and to enhance the robustness and resilience of the financial system (maybe even weeding out some compulsive greed, gambling, and arrogance in the process). That is, of course, as long as massive bailouts do not come to the rescue of political friends at the expense of victims, swallowing a “too big to fail” mantra—which, if repeated often enough, can become a dogma.
PREDICTING THE IMAGINARY To predict the expected performance of retirement plans, financial analysis models often rely on Monte Carlo simulations—a methodology name quite revealing as to its possible reliability. The fundamental idea behind a Monte Carlo simulation is to assume that since the future is unknown, future annual earnings are predicted using statistical data of annual earnings from the past, and pulling a random number from that data to predict the return for each future year—as if in a Monte Carlo casino.
In a simple way, this is like having a die that shows returns of 1 percent to 6 percent painted on each of its faces, and repeatedly rolling it to predict what the interest rate for the return on investment will be for each and every year ahead—a very casino-like method indeed. To dress the gambler in a nicer suit, multiple dice can be painted with different numbers on their faces so that when thrown together at the same time the results replicate the fact that some percentage returns have happened more frequently than others in the past. Still a random pursuit, but more statistically convincing. Then, to take away the fact that any resulting single prediction of return over a period of thirty years has a low probability of being right, many thousands of thirty-year predictions are generated by Monte Carlo simulations, and statistics can be computed on what the chances of running out of money are before dying—usually a bad scenario when it comes to retirement. The results can even state the probabilities of doing so if, by luck of the draw, the simulation turns out to include a year of truly bad returns happening at the worst possible time, at retirement —often using the negative stock market returns from the Great Recession of 2008,24 but without necessarily considering the ones from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Throw in annual returns from the Great Depression, and correlate the returns in successive years to match that period of history, and it is not clear if any of the Monte Carlo simulations can replicate that terrible scenario, or if it is an option that statistically disappears like the magnitude 7 vanishing act presented earlier. Hyperinflation and other black swan events that could wipe out all savings are also not included in the prediction, since the models use past data, and there is—by definition—no black swan in the data.
In other words, as sophisticated as this mathematical tool (and other ones) can be to calculate the funds that will be available at retirement based on returns and inflation over time, it remains that these are predictions based on statistics. Some will put great faith in those numbers, some will call it smoke and mirrors, and some, like Mark Twain, will say, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” If the future becomes an extension of the past, and the models assume the same, then the retirees will reach their promised retirement goals. If things get substantially more volatile, leading to a financial crash, the cakes served at retirement parties will be empty calories.
The survivors of a future financial meltdown might be those who did not put too much credence in financial models based on games that assume future returns dictated solely by the past—a very hard thing to do given the shortage of alternatives. After such a titanic event, those who had the wisdom to wear life jackets might prudently rebuild a less complex, less fragile, less speculative, and less gambler-focused financial system—at least for a few generations before history is forgotten and eventually repeats itself, as goes human nature.
IMAGINARY WEALTH When placing a bet on a football game at a Las Vegas casino, one option (and the simplest one) is to bet that one of the two teams will win. Going a few years back to illustrate the concept (still valid today), for a game between the Buffalo Bills and the New England Patriots when Tom Brady was their quarterback, the casino used a “money line” approach to account for the fact that more people were likely to bet on the Patriots. (Love or hate Brady, the fact remains that the Bills had won three times and lost thirty-one times against him.)25 For example, if the casino assumed that ten times more people would bet on the Patriots than on the Bills, those betting $100 on the Patriots could earn $104 if the Bills won, while those betting $100 on the Bills could get $1,110. Of course, no matter which team wins, the biggest winner remains the casino, which pockets a hefty percentage of the proceeds for providing this essential service called gambling. Before a 2018 judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, a federal law decreed that betting on sports was illegal26—except in Nevada.
When someone on Wall Street places a bet on the price of crude oil by purchasing “futures,” that trader speculates that the barrel of oil currently sold at $80 will be worth $100 six months later. The trader makes an $80,000 purchase for 1,000 barrels six month into the future at the current price.
Move six months forward. The trader must now pay $80,000 for the barrels. If the guess was correct and market price at that time is indeed $100 per barrel, the 1,000 barrels purchase is made and resold immediately, for a net profit of $20 per barrel, or $20,000. If luck has it that the market took a dive to $40 per barrel, the purchase and resale translates into a loss of $40,000. Of course, irrespective of the price of oil, the broker’s fees are charged in all transactions and the bank pockets a hefty percentage of the proceeds for providing this essential service called investing.27 There is more than one way to bet on a football game (covering the spread, betting on the total number of points, using parlay and teaser cards, etc.)28 and more than one way to invest in futures and other derivatives (leveraging, hedging, etc.).29 The big difference is that gamblers typically play their own money while traders gamble with other people’s money—pension funds, mutual funds, and other savings. Also, while casinos and banks generally never lose, in the rare instances when banks do, the government can print more money and bail them out.
There are probably many disaster stories in gambling and investing. To add to the fun though, there is now a new investment tool called “Catastrophe Bonds” that is just as thrilling to play. The rules of the game are as follows. If, for example, the It Takes a Disaster Insurance Company (ITADIC) expects (and is solvent) to cover $500 million in losses due to natural disasters each year. Following the traditional route, ITAD-IC would purchase coverage from a re-insurance company, which is effectively a “mega-size” insurance company that is in the business of providing coverage to the smaller players like ITAD-IC.30 The top two re-insurance companies (Swiss Re and Munich Re) collectively earn over $70 billion in insurance premiums annually.
31,32 If ITAD-IC’s payouts in a given year were to exceed $500 million, it would turn to its re-insurance company to pay the difference. The premiums to re-insure are not cheap. However, since 1997, insurance companies have created a clever tool called “Catastrophe Bonds.” Instead of reinsuring itself, ITAD-IC could issue bonds to be purchased by any interested investors. To illustrate the process, imagine that ITAD-IC issues one hundred thousand $1,000 bonds good for three years, paying an interest rate of 7 percent per year. This would correspond to a total inflow of $100 million that ITAD-IC will keep in a special account, as a reserve. The rules issued with the bonds would stipulate that if the disaster payouts from ITAD-IC on a given year do not exceed $500 million, then all the investors would receive their 7 percent interest payment. If the same happens three years in a row, in addition to the three years of interest, the same investors would get their money back at the end of the three years. However, should it happen on any given year that the ITAD-IC disaster payouts need to exceed $500 million, then the $100 million stashed in the special reserve becomes entirely the property of ITAD-IC.
This effectively makes the investors who purchased Catastrophe Bonds play the role of the re-insurance company and absorb the losses.33 No different than for the above games and investments, the Catastrophe Bonds can be purchased with many options, such as specifying that the investment would be lost only if the number of Category 4 hurricanes hitting a given state in a year exceeds four, or if the magnitude of the earthquake exceeds 7, and so on. They are also wonderful because they make it possible for Little Pigs who believe that the Big Bad Wolf is just a scary story and that disasters never happen, to put their money where their mouth is.
Nowadays, nearly $10 billion in Catastrophe Bonds are issued each year. As Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) replied to the punk who thought that the six bullets had already been fired from the.44 Magnum pointed at his head, “do you feel lucky?”34 ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
How Much Is a Ruble Worth?
The street vendor looked right, left, behind, right again, left again, and pulled out the matryoshka doll from his pocket.
Tourists visiting Moscow inevitably buy one or more of these hand painted wooden dolls—also known as babushka dolls— that open up to reveal a smaller replica of itself inside that again opens to reveal a smaller one inside it, and so on and so on. For a few rubles, official government stores sell them in many different sizes, some with as many as twenty or more dolls nested inside—all with colorfully painted cartoonish images of Russian women in traditional dress and scarf.
On the Arbat pedestrian street, though, in the 1980s, where all the artists, protesters, and other nonconformists gathered to check if the tiny bits of freedom promised by General Secretary Gorbachev’s perestroika were for real, the babushka dolls pulled out of the vendor’s pocket stretched perestroika a bit more than was believed safe. The outer doll depicted Gorbachev, and in succession for each inside doll, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, and Lenin—a bit of Russian humor apparently not shared by the authorities.
When I showed him a few rubles accompanied by hand gestures that I hoped made it clear I was asking how much it cost, the vendor said: “Dollars, not rubles. Real money only,” in what was maybe the extent of his English.
In an attempt by the Communist government to prevent the inflow of foreign currencies, the customs officer at the Moscow airport had asked me (as he asked every arriving foreigner) how much foreign currency I was bringing into the country. He stood motionless, in silence, for a good minute, maybe as a challenge to see if I would dare try to bribe him, or maybe expecting a tip in dollars for his services. Then, as if an of f icially required “wait time” condition had been met, he had me fill a form declaring the amount of dollars I had with me, he stamped that form and my passport, and told me (as he told everybody else too) that I had better leave with the same amount of foreign currency when flying back.
As a result, “real money” was rarer than rubles, but standard currency on Arbat Street.
The street vendor had been wise to insist on being paid in dollars. In 1990, when I visited, the official rate was $1.62 per ruble, but the black-market rate was more like 10 rubles per dollar—before haggling. Then, in 1991, reality struck as the USSR dissolved, and a ruble bought $0.16—a new of f icial exchange rate restricted to visiting tourists or those permitted to travel abroad.

We’re All Cooked
GLOBAL WARMING It is 2,800 miles south to north from the Canadian city of Windsor, Ontario (population: 217,000)1 to the Canadian outpost of Alert, Nunavut (where the population jumped from 5 in 2011 to 62 in winter 2016 and 110 in summer 2016 to cater to tourists2 suddenly attracted to the northernmost settlement in the world).3 That is 1,000 miles more than the distance from Key West (population: 24,500)4 to the northernmost tip of Maine (population: moose, loons, bald eagles, black bears, and other wildlife).5 In spite of its 2,800 miles north-south span, 90 percent of Canada’s population live within one hundred miles of the United States. The fact that most Canadian cities are lined up along its southern border does not reflect a strategy to invade the Americans in an imminent surprise attack, contrary to what was alleged in Canadian Bacon (directed by Michael Moore and featuring John Candy in his last movie). Rather, it is because Canada’s winters are brutally cold, so its citizens bundle up as far south as its borders allow. Do not tell Canadians that car emissions will accelerate global warming, because once made aware of this cause-effect relationship, some will leave their cars running all night in hopes of accelerating the process.
More pragmatically, like every other nation, Canadians are struggling to figure out how much climate will change, how to adjust to this change, and how to slow the process.
Those involved in the maple syrup industry, whose main worries used to be acid rain and bug infestations, must now contend with the impact of a shorter transition period from winter to summer temperature, which reduces the production season, and with winters of less snow, which can affect the health of its trees.6 The lobster industry also worries, as the lobster population is shifting in search of the colder waters it needs.7 At the same time, Canada has the third-largest known oil reserves in the world,8 estimated at 170 billion barrels in the tar sands of Alberta’s Athabasca region—two orders of magnitude larger than the reserves being pumped out by the Hibernia offshore platform,9 a hundred miles away from Newfoundland’s lobster territory— and the country is cashing on that oil as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, extracting oil from tar sands is an environmentally destructive activity10 that creates considerable environmental pollution and produces more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil drilling.11 Presumably to demonstrate that the country has a social conscience and is a good world citizen, Natural Resources Canada published a flyer acknowledging that the oil sands operations contributed to 7.8 percent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, but that this only amounted to 0.1 percent of the entire world’s global emissions. It added that Canada, in the totality of all its economic activities, produced only 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, displaying a beautiful pie chart showing that the United States, China, and Europe, respectively, contribute 22, 20, and 17 percent.12 Yes, Canadians are pros too, when it comes to packaging facts in favorable statistics, because rearranging the numbers to instead plot greenhouse gas emissions per capita would have shown that Canadians are on par with all these other emitting countries.
In fact, Canada is no different than many other countries that proclaim to be leaders in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that promise to achieve net-zero emissions decades into the future.13 They may have to use clever accounting tricks to meet these goals down the line—such as getting credits for the reduction in emissions that will occur if China builds power plants fueled by natural gas (exported by Canada) instead of coal. However, while Canada does not appear to be in a position to lecture others when it comes to climate change, others are not in a position to lecture Canada either. In fact, most countries seem to suffer from split personality disorder—or even schizophrenia—when it comes to climate change.
Climate change disasters maybe be disasters in slow motion—because it will take a while for the palm tree to replace the maple leaf on Canada’s flag—but they are disasters, nonetheless. Therefore, everything presented in earlier chapters about disasters due to natural hazards is equally applicable to climate change. Problems related to time scale, predictions, human behavior, politics, and the rest, all remain true, but all of that is complicated by one compounding factor: the behavior of the messengers.
SOPHISTS In the 1970s and 1980s, Jim and Tammy Bakker hosted The PTL Club, which was a highly successful evangelist Christian television program (PTL = Praise the Lord). The show was reported to raise in excess of $1 million per week in donations,14 which were used in part to create a religious theme park that attracted five million people per year15— making it the third largest theme park in the U.S. at the time16—and in part to further the PTL mission at the Bakker’s discretion. The Bakkers also reportedly lived a flamboyant lifestyle17 referred to as prosperity gospel18— which is pretty much what it sounds like.19 The husbandand-wife televangelist team promoted the tenets of evangelical Protestantism, a denomination that embraces the authority of the Bible as a strict “gospel truth” that dictates all actions and beliefs in life.20 Sexual encounters with a secretary behind the wife’s back, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase her silence, and a forced resignation all interfered with delivery of the message.21 It also suggested that there might be lots of room for interpretation in the Good Book. But it is interpretation of the “good book” of the Internal Revenue Service that somehow got Jim Bakker in trouble with US Government law, as he was found guilty and sentenced to forty-five years in a federal prison on counts of fraud and conspiracy.
22 Eventually, the sentence was reduced to eight years. He was paroled and released after less than five years and has since launched the Jim Bakker Show to spread biblical revelations that the end of the world is near,23 collect donations to help in broadcasting that message, and sometimes sell generators and special food supplies to survive the Apocalypse.24 Some people have no problem with that career path and generously support him financially. Less forgiving, others find it contemptible that someone who preached high moral values found it perfectly acceptable to partake in adultery and fraud. Yet, conflicted preachers25 are not an exception when it comes to contradictions. Countless politicians claiming to be standard-bearers for traditional values based on religious beliefs have been caught red-handed doing some serious hanky-panky with secretaries, lobbyists, reporters, strippers, prostitutes—or even enjoying secret homosexual encounters of the type they vehemently condemned in speeches.26 Rare seem to be those who can actually walk the talk— those that do often become the cornerstone of new religions. Throughout history, there have been a lot of wellintentioned folks eager to share with everyone their version of wisdom, their understanding of the truth, and their perfect solution to all problems; unfortunately, sometimes blatantly, sometimes unintentionally, this amounted essentially to “do what I say, not what I do.” Messengers that contradict what they profess tend to kill the message.
That clumsiness is at the root of many tensions when it comes to climate change. When someone calls wolf, that someone better be credible because asking everybody to drop everything and take immediate action is a serious matter. For a messenger, being genuinely scared does not count as a credential, and having solid credentials is also irrelevant if the solutions advocated are full of loopholes.
Scientists generally agree that global warming is taking place. A NASA website refers to this consensus by stating that this is the opinion of more than 97 percent of climate scientists who are active researchers, and that this is most likely due to human activities27—referring to eighteen national scientific organizations and agencies supporting this statement and more than two hundred similar groups worldwide.28 Data collected worldwide indicates that the global temperature is rising, that oceans are becoming warmer, that glaciers are receding, that the Arctic and Antarctic ice masses are shrinking, and that water levels are rising. Even climate change deniers generally do not deny that global warming is occurring; rather, they claim to be skeptical that this is attributable mainly to human activity.
Scientists are usually credible people. Their job is to question, probe, observe, study, investigate, and hopefully make new discoveries about how the world works—from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, and everything in between. Discovery is a serious endeavor, and—nowadays— a most expensive one. Take astrophysics, for instance. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was brought into orbit by the space shuttle Discovery. Original cost estimate for the project was $400 million, but by the time it was finally launched in 2010, the bill had reached $4.7 billion29—clearly, great astro-physicists do not make great accountants. Unfortunately, once images from space started to be beamed down to earth, some were blurry and it was found that the mirror had been incorrectly polished. No sweat; a repair crew flew up to fix it in 1994.
Thereafter, four other space shuttle missions followed, up to until 2009, to replace old instruments that had reached their lifespan—sometimes much sooner than anticipated. The total aggregated cost related to the Hubble Telescope construction, launch, and five servicing missions is estimated to be on the order of $10 billion.30 Yet the telescope is aging, so the James Webb Space Telescope (launched December 25, 2021) now is complementing and extending the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, with a telescope mirror three times larger than Hubble, packed with newer and better toys, and carrying a bigger overall price tag—originally estimated to cost $1.6 billion, but ending up at more than $10 billion at launch time. With an orbit higher than Hubble, it will be too high for servicing; it also will have a planned service life of only five to ten years. This makes it imperative to already start planning for its replacement. Therefore, astrophysicists are already dreaming of a (more expensive) space telescope with a forty-five-foot-wide mirror to be launched in space sometime around 2030, to search for evidence of life on the universe’s distant exoplanets or dig deeper into space to pry from the oldest black holes information on how galaxies form and evolve31 so that we can better predict our destiny, either when the Milky Way (home) will collide with the Andromeda galaxy four billion years from now32 or when the sun will turn into a giant red star that will engulf the earth maybe slightly sooner.
33 One would be hard pressed to find a scientist saying that this valuable research is a boondoggle. To them, this is top science and worth every dollar of it. Yet one launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy emits more carbon dioxide in a couple of minutes than a car does in two hundred years34 (the Ariane 5 rocket that launched the James Webb Space Telescope burns about 25 percent more fuel than that).35 Vaporization of space junk reentering the atmosphere also produces pollution, although that has not been quantified.36 Every launch also spews iron, lithium, nickel, mercury, and other metals into the lagoons around Cape Canaveral that are home to a rich wildlife.37 To some folks, scientists calling wolf with respect to climate change but giving the quest for the stars a special free pass to pollute sounds like preachers sleeping with porn stars. Scientists will respond that the sum of all rocket launches amounts to less than one-hundred-thousandth of all global CO2 emissions, compared to the airline industry that contributes nearly 3 percent of all emissions (a great line that the new space tourists will remember to use).38 This is somewhat like the obnoxious neighbor with the junk cars on the driveway and garbage littering the untended lawn asking to be left alone because this is nothing compared to the gigantic city dump where all the owners of pristine homes on manicured lots send their garbage.
However, scientists are unfettered by such frivolous and sophistic accusations. The math is definitely on their side when it comes to rockets. As for the airplane emissions, it is a serious problem, but exceptions are fully justified when it comes to big scientific powwows where important matters are discussed. The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences regroups 273 societies and academies of science, for more than ten million members.
That makes for hundreds of annual meetings, conferences, and other junkets in attractive locations for which these members—probably feeling very guilty—jumped in an airplane. Annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers typically attract roughly nine thousand people.39 The national conferences of the American Chemical Society (one of the world’s largest scientific societies) attracts between twelve thousand and eighteen thousand participants—twice each year.
40 The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting typically attracts between twenty-five thousand and thirty-five thousand attendees. It is fair to assume that few, if any, of these scientists sailed— Greta-style—to any of these conferences, as serious scientists typically find the airlines more accommodating of their busy schedule and have little time for publicity stunts.
Not to be outdone, 26,706 participants registered for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2019—a tad shy of the 28,141 that participated in 2018.41 Although, in this last case, the conference organizers made it clear that lots of trees were planted to offset the carbon emissions related to the conference. This is commendable, as few other conferences bother with such forestry projects.
Planting trees is definitely convenient to purchase peace of mind—somewhat like donating a few dollars to a hospital foundation each time one binges through an ice cream bucket. Even more convenient, as a bonus to those who purchase carbon credits from firms catering to this market, the carbon offsets are credited on the day of the purchase— apparently, in some cases, the benefits corresponding to the full one hundred years of a tree’s life can be accounted for when calculating credits.42 Unfortunately, a planted tree does not achieve maturity for twenty years,43 and many of those traveling scientists are categorical that it will be too late if emissions are not reduced to specific caps within ten years. In some other cases, instead of planting new trees (as those who purchased the carbon offsets possibly expected), what has been sold is the right to claim credits for the carbon absorbed by existing trees—arguably because they have not been cut.44 This is a bit like promising a romantic dinner and a sunny vacation to a loved one, and delivering on the promise by pulling a lawn chair in the backyard and ordering pizza when the sun shows up between two clouds.
With the carbon offset world still in its infancy, it remains largely unregulated in many ways,45 which apparently makes it possible to be highly creative in calculating what a carbon credit is, how many credits a specific activity is worth, and how many times the same credit can be sold to multiple buyers—to the point of where some have called carbon offset credits an “imaginary commodity,”46 which is an interesting perspective given that it is an idea that has been embraced by investment firms and politicians.
Arguably, buying carbon credits is somewhat like shoveling “doggy doo” into the neighbor’s backyard.47 If the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, the most effective actions might be those taken at the source. Everybody can participate in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and everybody has a number of solutions ready to be applied to others, but, there again, the messengers tend to preach abstinence while behaving like sailors on a shore leave.
There are those who advocate greater use of public transportation but have never set foot in a transit bus or have not done so since they were students48—which is even more damning when these are managers working at public transportation authorities.
There are those who advocate curtailing air travel.
Dominic Champagne wrote and directed the show Love, jointly produced by the Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corp, featuring the music of the Beatles.49 More than eight million people, since 2006, have flown to Las Vegas and paid hundreds of dollars to see it.50 The same Dominic launched the “Pact for Transition” initiative in 2019,51 whereby people could sign an online pledge to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions by, among many things, minimizing air travel. The list of those who took the pledge includes the Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberté,52 former street performer and founder of the Cirque du Soleil,53 also known as Canada’s first space tourist for having paid $35 million for a personal twelve-day trip to the International Space Station from where he participated in a webcast to create awareness about the importance of water conservation.54 There are those who advocate that people should move into smaller homes to save the planet, recommending to cut today’s average 2,600-square-foot home in half.
55 Those who adhere to the tiny house movement promote even more simplicity, squeezing down to 400 square feet.56 At the same time, to enjoy post-presidential life, President Obama purchased an $11.75 million, 6,892-square-foot house in Martha’s Vineyard.57 Given that President Obama’s 2015 action plan to address the threat of climate change emphasized the use of clean energy and decreasing carbon emissions,58 the mansion’s occupants will likely heat the place by cuddling together or by installing the more than one hundred solar panels needed to power a house of that size on a sunny day.
59 The sizeable percentage of its 29.3 acres that is covered by manicured lawns will also likely be cut using scissors instead of a fleet of lawnmowers.
Maybe house size is a moot point. As clarified by Al Gore’s communication director when it was revealed that the author of An Inconvenient Truth owned a 10,000-squarefoot home near Nashville, Tennessee60 that used twelve times the energy of a typical Nashville home, the former vice president makes up for it by purchasing green energy and carbon offsets.61 This is also probably the case for Gore’s 6,500-square-foot, six-fireplace second home in Montecito, California.62 There are those who advocate only eating locally produced food—incidentally, achieving food self-sufficiency regionally would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce vulnerability to natural disasters and events that happen elsewhere and that can disrupt the global food supply chain (a benefit only if the local food sources are not themselves vulnerable to a local disaster). Saying goodbye to bananas and encouraging the local economy makes sense, although “local” is an elastic concept given that most developed places are not self-sufficient when it comes to food. The 1.4 million residents of Hawaii,63 who currently import more than 85 percent of their food, might be able to adapt to some degree, as stated in the State’s Increased Food Security and Food Self-Sufficiency Strategy.
64 The 730,000 residents of Alaska may be more challenged to do so.
65 Incidentally, self-sufficiency by itself is not synonymous with a healthy diet. For example, a 2006 study by the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands reported that the province’s farmers only produced 48 percent of the food consumed by the 4.1 million66 residents of the province at the time. This self-reliance measure would have dropped to 34 percent if the good people of British Columbia had put in their plate as many fruits and vegetables as recommended by Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating—and possibly even lower percentages when considering that the province’s population increased since that study, to 5.1 million in 202067—because the province imports a lot more fruits than it produces.68 Then again, eating local is not necessarily a sure bet to reduce carbon emissions. Farming is an activity that can also produce carbon emissions when all is taken into account. A study calculated that by the time it ends in grocery stores, New Zealand lamb shipped from halfway around the globe to the United Kingdom has produced only a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted for local British lamb.69 This is apparently because New Zealanders let their sheep roam around in wide meadows to graze on naturally growing grass and clover, without the need to use additives or hormones70 whereas British farmers feed them grain that requires a substantial amount of energy to grow.
71 At the same time, to remain energized through all these activities, many climate change advocates and activists presumably drink coffee. Does their credibility erode with each cup? While California, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico produce some coffee,72 more than $4 billion worth of coffee is imported from far greater distances (that do not qualify as “local”) to quench the country’s addiction to caffeine73— which is less than half of what Europe imports.74 It has been estimated that 140 billion pounds of CO2 is produced to make it possible for the world to drink its five hundred billion pounds of coffee every year,75 which is as much emissions as sixty-four million passengers flying from London to New York.76 For comparison, the major US airlines collectively transported twenty-six million passengers across the Atlantic in 2018.77 Not bad for a product nonessential to life and that has a near-zero nutritional value78—before it gets loaded-up with milk, sugar, whipped cream, and other trimmings that make calories skyrocket.
To avoid being perceived as individuals who see the straw in the others’ eye but not the beam in their own, trading the coffee drinking habit for the healthier one of drinking water (directly from the faucet, without plastic bottles) would go a long way. That might be quite a challenge though, given that, for comparison, when asked to choose between a month without coffee or without cell phone, 49 percent of coffee drinkers answered they would prefer ditching the phone.79 Actually, for those messengers eager to live by their message, ditching both coffee and the phone might even be better. All the emails, chats, photos, and videos that end up posted on climate change websites or simply posted on the cloud, consume energy—90 billion kilowatt-hours in the United States alone, 416 terawatts worldwide, and growing.80 For comparison, a large coal powered plant produces approximately five hundred megawatts. This power-hunger is because the cloud is not in the sky, but rather scattered all over the world, in thousands of data centers that are essentially large warehouses (of up to half a million square feet) filled with storage technology heated/cooled to maintain optimal operational temperature for the hardware. Fortunately, some of the more modern ones use solar energy with a few hours of battery backup (and maybe someday enough battery backup to run 24/7 on solar energy).81 All of that to make sure the World Wide Web is ready to instantaneously satisfy anybody’s urge to access all of the planet’s data—or watch cat videos on YouTube.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN EARTHQUAKE The awful (and inconvenient) truth is that all that clowning around does not make climate change less of a reality.
Data on annual global temperature since 1880, as reported by NOAA, indicates a slight decrease of 0.35°F from 1880 to 1910, and from then an increase of 1.4°F from 1910 to 2020—at an accelerating rate of 0.32°F per decade since 1981.82 Evidently, that is an average using temperatures measured across the planet; variations are significant, even across the same country, as the rate has been three times slower than average in Florida, but two times faster than average in the Northeastern United States.
This warming has left its imprint in many ways, such as seen through the melting of glaciers. Photographic records as well as on-the-ground markers have clearly documented the retreat of 90 percent of the world’s glaciers—by more than a mile in some cases.83 Although a few have expanded (such as the Jokobshavn glacier in Greenland that has grown 100 feet thicker per year from 2016 to 2019),84 the net total globally is a significant loss. These are facts, based on tangible data. What the future holds falls within the realm of predictions, some more pessimistic than others, some with more sophisticated models than others, with all the caveats and uncertainties that this entails.85 Alternative scenarios predict a further global warming of 2.1°C to 3.9°C (of 3.8°F to 7.0°F) by the year 2100 if continuing current practices.86 Nobody deliberately wishes global warming to occur.
Owners of ski resorts are seriously concerned that their business is melting away, but, so far, none of their clients have used sailboats to travel uphill to the slopes. The 130 million skiers worldwide have typically used cars, buses, trains, or airplanes to reach one of the six thousand ski resorts located in sixty-seven countries, and use some of their twenty-three thousand lifts to reach the top of the mountains.87 In parallel, the average global sea level has increased by roughly nine inches since 1880—again, non-uniformly across the planet when it comes to impact on shores, due to variable local ground settlement, ongoing slow “rebounding” of the continent from the previous Ice Age, regional currents, and many other factors.88 Two of the factors that have caused this increase in sea level are the thermal expansion of seawater as it gets warmer (everything expands with increases in temperature) and the added meltwaters from receding glaciers located on land (and only those on land, because a glacier that floats displaces its own volume in water, resulting in a zero net change in water level when it melts). Again, these are facts, based on tangible data. Again (and it is worth repeating), what the future holds falls within the realm of predictions, some more pessimistic than others, some with more sophisticated models than others, with all the caveats and uncertainties that this entails. Alternative scenarios predict a further global sea level increase ranging from ten to one hundred inches above current levels by the year 2100.
Nobody deliberately wishes oceans to rise and coastlines to flood. Owners of beach resorts are seriously concerned that the beaches are being eroded away. In Florida alone, beach tourism brings nearly $50 billion per year to the state’s economy.
89 Yet, facts are facts. The data shows a clear and definite trend in everything that relates to global warming— something that everybody can see, in spite of the flaws, contradictions, and goofiness of the messengers. Not surprisingly, surveys conducted worldwide reveal that, depending on the country, 75 to 97 percent of people believe that climate change is occurring90 (the number in the United States hovers at 75 to 80 percent, depending on the survey).91 Furthermore, between 50 and 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is human-caused, the actual number again depending on how the question is asked92—as is the case with statistics, surveys can be structured (some would say “gamed”) to give different answers. More than two-thirds of Americans indicate that they are worried about global warming and think that it will harm the country (50 percent think it will harm them personally).93 Yet, while the automobile industry saw an overall 1.3 percent decline in the number of vehicles sold in 2019, sales of pickup trucks and SUVs increased by 2.6 percent,94 in spite of the fact that passenger cars generally have a 50 to 100 percent superior fuel efficiency.
95 Apparently, worries do not always translate into action.
All the above is perfectly understandable when recognizing that climate change is nothing more than an earthquake—albeit in slow motion. As such, it is possible that marches, protests, sit-ins, bed-ins, and other mass mobilizations will have an impact and “move the needle” to some degree, one nudge at the time—as all the silent heroes have done for decades when it comes to earthquakes and other hazards. However, as for all hazards, nothing is as effective as a disaster by itself: it not only moves the needle, but it also puts jet engines on it. A disaster is a truthful and reliable messenger.
Sadly, when low elevation atolls and coral reefs are swallowed by the rising sea, few industrialized countries will pay attention. An earthquake far away is generally ignored —beyond well-wishing thoughts, donations to humanitarian relief, and a few benefit concerts.
However, when downtown Miami and Manhattan find themselves flooded weeks at a time, damaging trillions of dollars in real estate and creating massive economic losses, the calls for a national state of emergency will be heeded.
An earthquake at home can have an impact.
Therefore, it is the redeeming feature of global warming that it is a relatively slow process, not a sudden one. Its ravages will be felt over decades, but the problem is more akin to a cargo ship running into a shallow sand bar than to the Titanic hitting an iceberg.
Climate scientists may be calling for a global state of emergency to enact dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions before the doomsday beyond which damage will be irreversible, but all this wisdom, all this science, and all these predictions will likely continue to fall—for the most part—on deaf ears until real pain from a few major disasters related to global warming are felt locally. At home. Where it hurts. In ways that are unambiguously clear.
The “unambiguously clear” part is critical. There have been hurricanes, floods, heat waves, hail, and other disasters before. Attributing every future such disaster to global warming is not necessarily convincing—particularly when well-intentioned eco-alarmists argue that every time someone sneezes it is because of global warming. Dozens of cyclones have developed year after year over the oceans, but not all of those are large, and not all make it to shore.
Florida was hit by five Category 4 hurricanes from 1945 to 1950, but none struck the state in the thirty-year span from 1961 to 1991.96 Hurricane landfall is a hit and miss game, so when two will hit Florida in a given year, those attributing this catastrophe to global warming will get a lot of media attention but possibly will achieve nothing else—whether global warming increases the number of hurricanes per year or not.
Attributing every wildfire to global warming is not convincing either. On a good year, most of California sees less than an inch of rain per month for five to seven consecutive months.97 Months with zero precipitations are frequent. In fact, most of California would still be a desert if not for the fact that water has been channeled to its cities from hundreds of miles away (in some of the most geographical and political tortuous ways).98 As a result, much of California’s hills are most of the time covered by dried grass ready to be ignited at the first spark. Equipment owned by the Pacific Gas & Electric company (PG&E)—which provides power to more than half of California—has apparently generously provided such sparks. The California courts declared the utility company responsible for no less than seventeen wildfires in 2017—out of a total of twentyone that year. Since the company has been deemed negligent in adequately trimming the vegetation around its power lines and equipment, bringing combustible material closer to sparks,99 California courts approved a $25.5 billion100 settlement by which PG&E compensated the victims of the wildfires it caused in 2017 and 2018.101 For good measure, the California Public Utilities Commission tacked an additional $1.9 billion fine on top.102 As part of the process, PG&E also pleaded guilty to eighty-four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
103 Somehow, the litigating parties apparently did not think of suing the millions of licensed drivers in California, who produced more than a third of the state’s greenhouse gases104 that contributed to the same global warming blamed to be responsible for increasing the number of wildfires per year. None of the above are unambiguously clear events— whether or not global warming contributes to an increase in their frequency.
An unambiguously clear event is something new and measurable that has never happened before and that can be directly attributed to a specific cause, without any reasonable doubt. This is because it takes more than massive consensus to move the needle; it takes an emotional earthquake. If it were easy to move any needle, it would not have taken until 2017 for the citizens of Boulder, Colorado—known to be so environmentally conscious and avant-gardist in promoting sustainability that detractors and supporters alike refer to the city as the “People’s Republic of Boulder” 105—to have their local electric company shut down its coal-fired power plant and transition to natural gas.106
PHLEGETHON It is pleasurable nowadays to take a romantic stroll along the Seine in Paris. People living along its banks during antiquity felt similarly blessed, not so much for the romance in that case but rather for the abundance of pure drinking water and fishes it provided. More problematic, for the centuries between these two extremes, someone on a date would have made a serious strategic mistake to suggest a walk along the river, for the same reason that a guided tour of the sewers is generally not propitious to triggering a lasting romance. As it grew to become the biggest city in Europe in the Middle Ages,107 everything was conveniently dumped into the Seine: sewers, animal carcasses, industrial waste, tanners’ dye, and more. As early as the twelfth century, the king preferred to keep his windows closed to avoid smelling the stench from the river.
108 As industry grew, so did pollution, up through the twentieth century when heavy metals, chemicals, fertilizers, antibiotics, and other poisons were added to the mix. This was not a unique situation. In the 1950s, the Thames through London was said to be a foul-smelling sewer of dead water for miles downstream of the city.
109 The rest of Europe did not do much better, from the Danube110 to the Elbe.111 The European practice of dumping everything and the kitchen sink into nearby waters traveled with the explorers to the new world where polluting rivers was accepted practice up to the late 1960s.
In Greek mythology, Phlegethon was a stream of fire— probably a river of lava. Not to be outdone, the United States created its own burning river. The Cuyahoga River runs through Cleveland, which was for decades one of the major industrial centers of the Great Lakes region. As such, it collected pretty much everything these industries along its shore could dump into it, as a standard operating procedure. In those days, trashing a river was considered a normal tradeoff for prosperity.
112 However, the Cuyahoga was not just polluted, it was the most polluted in country. In fact, so polluted that it frequently caught fire: thirteen times from 1868 to 1969. In 1912, a fire on the river killed five people. In 1952, another river fire caused $1.3 million in damages. Nothing changed then.
However, in 1969, when oil-soaked floating debris ignited, the fire did not kill anyone, and it only inflicted $100,000 in damage to two nearby bridges, but it was the right earthquake at the right time. It is hard to find a better poster child for stopping pollution than a burning river.
Something is seriously wrong when water, beyond not being safe to drink anymore, catches fire. Through the fifties and sixties, the population was progressively becoming more aware and upset at the growing pollution problems, most notably due to the smog visible in big cities, the recognized dangers of pesticides (such as DDT), endangered species, major oil spills washing ashore, and many more.113 Images of the blue planet taken by the budding space program provided snapshots that made it clear that the earth was of a finite size. The burning Cuyahoga River topped it off. It was the earthquake moment that led to the National Environment Policy Act (NEPA), which itself led to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). One of the first successes of the EPA was the Clean Water Act of 1972, which had as a goal that all of the nation’s rivers be cleaned to allow the safe return of swimmers and fishes by 1983.114 Nowadays, people are swimming in the Cuyahoga River (except after heavy rains that raise the concentrations of E. coli in water—a different problem) and are catching fish that are safe to eat.115 Concerns nowadays are that the river, like many others,116 may be filled with viruses, bacteria, and microparasites,117 but this is a different problem that will need its own different earthquake.
Similar earthquakes are needed—and will happen—to tackle most modern problems, and not only global warming.
For example, the plastic crisis will take more than a ban on plastic forks to be resolved. The fact that the pile-up of plastic garbage is invisible to North Americans makes the crisis intangible and could possibly allow it to continue until the much-needed earthquake happens.
Collecting plastic out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,118 by deploying an array of floaters that drag a debriscollecting skirt using the ocean’s energy itself, is an unprecedented undertaking that is receiving worldwide acclaim. A possible danger is that, by demonstrating that “oceanic garbage collection” is an achievable technology, it could become a regular garbage collection service billed to users like any other business and thus allow polluters—with a clear conscience—to think of plastic as “not so harmful to the ocean after all.” Biodegradable plastics that break down into smaller bits have also been reported to be problematic, first because these microplastics can accumulate in the ecosystem and the food chain with some continued damaging effects, and second because it makes the problems less visible, giving the impression that it has vanished.119 Perfectly biodegradable plastics would need to have molecules that completely disassemble themselves into carbon atoms.
Typically, microorganisms are needed to “compost” these biodegradable plastics into water, carbon dioxide, and biomass.120 Various chemical companies claim to be working in that direction or to have products already capable of such a feat.121 There will be resistance to adoption if it costs more than the existing plastics of the planet-polluting kind.
However, when a window of opportunity is opened up by the much-needed “plastic earthquake” of the future, the extra cost of plastics that can biodegrade to the carbon atomic level will be deemed fully worth paying.
Until then, many folks will continue trying to figure out how to deal with the contradictions of messengers. This will leave many to ponder whether it is better for the planet to buy six green peppers that have not been grown organically but that can be taken with bare hands directly from the vegetable counter, or to pay more for six green peppers that are certified organic but that have been individually wrapped in plastic for some perplexing reason.

ON THE DISASTER TRAIL
Where the Buf
falo Roam
On April 20, 2002, an early morning magnitude 5.1 earthquake with its epicenter fifteen miles southwest of Plattsburgh, New York, woke up a lot of people across the state. Earthquake waves travel well and far in eastern North America because the underlying bedrock there is less fractured than on the western part of the continent. People reportedly felt the earthquake from Buffalo to Boston, and as far south as Baltimore.122 For an earthquake of that size, damaged chimneys, settlement of road embankments, and other minor damage would be expected in close proximity to the epicenter area, and not much else—and that is exactly what happened. Nevertheless, it made for a busy day at the Multidisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research Center, as we fielded media calls while trying to put together a small team to travel to Plattsburgh and document the damage, however small it might be—after all, it is not every day that an earthquake happens in our home state, so it deserved some attention even though it was insignificant on the grand scale of things.
One local TV station insisted on coming to campus for an interview to be aired on the 11 o’clock evening news. I was quite busy but agreed to meet them at 6 p.m. in our earthquake engineering laboratory. The lab was filled with advanced equipment to load structures statically and dynamically with hundreds of thousands of pounds of loading, as well as, on any given day, some rather interesting test specimens. Not surprisingly, many groups typically ask to visit the lab during the year, and we have hosted many tours of the facility.
When I arrived at 6 p.m., spotlights were on, the camera was ready to roll, and the airbrushed news reporter was pumped up and ready. Her first question was: “This was quite an earthquake for New York State. How much damage should we expect to find in Buffalo?” My answer—and the correct one—was, “None. Given the size of this earthquake, and the fact that Plattsburgh is three hundred miles from Buffalo, it is most unlikely that it could have produced any damage in Buffalo.” As soon she heard the word “none,” she made a face and told her crew to start packing up. There would be no damage in Buffalo, so the whole thing became of no interest —instantly so. My offer to give a personal tour of the lab to showcase the research conducted at the university by many professors to prevent damage from future earthquakes anywhere worldwide was met with an empty stare. Her body language made it clear that she felt she had wasted time driving with her crew to our lab with no sensational story to bring back—something she could have avoided with a simple question during the original phone call she had made to set up the interview.
This was a fantastic example of “if it didn’t happen here, who cares?” Incidentally, it was also a fantastic example of “reporters in search of infotainment are maybe not real journalists” but that is a different story.