HLS558: Whole Community Disaster Preparedness

Anticipation and Preparation

Overview

Several of the lessons that follow deal with the way organizations and large agencies prepare for and respond to disasters. In this lesson, we also consider the way individuals think about (or fail to think about) and prepare for disasters, and the relationships between these individual responses and organizational strategies for anticipating and preparing for disasters.

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Analyze disaster preparation literature to identify strategies that target the individuals/household level, the local government level, and the state/federal government level
• Generate a disaster planning proposal that specifically targets individuals with disabilities and special needs

Classes of Disasters

As you might suspect, individual responses can be quite different from organizational responses, partly because of perceptions of responsibility (i.e., people may believe it is the responsibility of government, the Red Cross, the U.N., etc. to plan for disasters, and take little individual responsibility of initiative) and effectiveness (i.e., people may believe that there is little they can do to plan for or respond to disasters). However, individuals do take a whole series of actions that reflect their plans for or their failure to plan for disasters, ranging from purchasing insurance and putting together emergency kits to installing alarms, making plans for what to do in case of fires, floods, etc., to searching out information about how to respond to disasters, and it is useful to understand what people do and why when thinking about and preparing for potential disasters.

It is important to distinguish between different classes of disasters, because it is extremely unlikely that any individual (or any organization) will plan for all possible disaster events. For the purposes of this lesson, it is useful to sort disasters into three categories:

• Predictable – e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires in areas where these are relatively frequent or common experiences
• Predicted – e.g., terrorism, war, volcanic eruption, and other events that might be predicted to occur, but that do not follow any clear historical pattern (meaning that the predictions might or might not be true)
• Unforseen - e.g., the December 26, 2004 tsunami, 9/11

Anticipatory Responses to Predictable Disasters

Large numbers of people live in areas where disasters or the conditions leading to disasters are a fact of life. In the U.S., flood plains are heavily populated. Hundreds of thousands live in "Tornado Alley." Millions live on the Gulf Coast. Tens of millions live along the San Andreas Fault. How do they cope with the constant threat of disasters?

For most people, the threat of disasters is something like traffic noise – i.e., people get used to the threat, and soon come to ignore it. This is the process psychologists refer to as “habituation”, a process by which people become used and fail to respond to constant stimuli. Wikipedia presents a very familiar example of habituation, noting that a short amount of time after dressing, the stimulus the weight of clothes creates is 'ignored' by the nervous system and we become unaware of it. The same might be said of responses to constant threats of disasters. Over time, people who are exposed on a daily basis to the threat of predictable disasters may come to dismiss or ignore the threat.

It is not hard to see why people might habituate to the threat of a disaster. Consider the case of a family living along the San Andreas fault. They are often reminded of the very real threat of an earthquake, but there might be years or even decades between serious earthquake. Thus, each day, you wake up with the prediction that there will be a terrible earthquake soon, and each night you go to bed knowing that (once again) it did not occur. The paradoxical effect of this constant exposure to the threat of a disaster, without that threat coming true, is that as time goes on, the probability of actually experiencing an earthquake will go up, but the belief that it will occur will go down. One of the challenges facing agencies charged with maintaining public health and public safety may be to get people who are constantly exposed to the threat of a disaster to take that threat seriously and prepare for that threat.

It is important to emphasize that habituation is not a universal response, and that some people living in high-threat areas do indeed take a variety of precautions. It is also important to emphasize that habituation has its advantages. It would not be easy, and perhaps not even possible, to live normal life while constantly worrying about potential disasters. Perhaps the most adaptive response to the threat of predictable disasters is to develop a combination of a healthy respect for the threat together with the ability to put that threat to the back of your mind once realistic preparations have been made.

Anticipatory Responses to Predicted Disasters

A very different set of responses might be expected to for disasters that are not constant, long-anticipated threats, but rather are threats that emerge somewhat quickly, but with adequate warning for people to prepare. The prediction of a serious earthquake 1990 along the New Madrid fault in the midwestern United States illustrates some of the unique issues faced by a population dealing with a prediction of disaster.

It might surprise you to learn that the most dangerous earthquake zone in North America is not in California or Alaska, but rather in the middle of the US. There is a fault zone running near the borders of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Illinois. In 1811-1812, several of the most serious earthquakes ever to strike the U.S. occurred along this fault line. These quakes were felt over virtually the entire United States, except for the Pacific coast, and they changed the course of the Mississippi River, created new lakes, and destroyed over 150,000 acres of forest.

A catastrophic earthquake was predicted for December 3, 1990. Luckily, no earthquake occurred, and there have not been major earthquakes along this fault since. However, the prediction of a large-scale earthquake does give some picture of how people might prepare for such a disaster. The responses to this prediction give room for both hope and concern.

Local communities took this prediction seriously and sales of earthquake insurance policies soared. Many residents stockpiled water, flashlight batteries, plastic bags, and toilet paper. Some people (but not many) left the area, and in the days prior to the predicted earthquake, the news media descended on New Madrid, hoping to cover the disaster. There was no disaster, but there was considerable evidence of anticipatory stress reactions.

Anticipatory stress occurs when people react to the prediction or the expectation of a threatening situation as if they are already experiencing the threat. Anticipatory stress occurs while people are waiting in a dentist’s office, while novice skydivers are getting ready to make their first few jumps, when combat pilots are getting ready for a new mission, etc. The widespread prediction of a serious earthquake in New Mardid led to a similar reaction. There is evidence, for example, that children and adolescents in New Madrid experienced relatively mild (but nevertheless significant) symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, simply as a result of the prediction that a disaster was about to strike.

On the whole, it seems like the prediction of an imminent disaster (as opposed to a chronic but non-specific threats) has both adaptive and maladaptive effects. A credible prediction that a disaster is likely to occur can lead people to take precautions, but can also serve as a source of significant stress. The challenge here is to create disaster warnings that will increase the likelihood of adaptive responses (i.e., buying insurance, obtaining disaster response kits) without also leading to anticipatory stress

Responses to Unforseen Disasters

Some disasters are virtually impossible to foresee, or at least are completely unforeseen by most of the people who experience the disaster. Sometimes, there are warning signs available to experts, but disasters such as the December 26, 2004 tsunami or 9/11 struck most of their victims with virtually no warning. These disasters have a number of effects, one of which will be discussed here – i.e., tunnel vision.

By definition, it is unreasonable to expect individuals to prepare for unforeseen disasters (in contrast, organizations might be expected to prepare for a wide range of disasters, even though many are frankly unlikely to occur). Other than some vague anticipation that some thing might occur, there is probably little people can or will do to anticipate and prepare for some disasters. What happens, then, when some unforeseen disaster strikes.

Disasters that strike without warning seem to be especially stressful. Even in cases where people do little to physically prepare for an expected disaster (e.g., families living on a flood plain might not obtain or prepare emergency response kits), a case can be made that warnings of a disaster help people to psychologically prepare. Unforeseen disasters lead to a wide variety of effects, one of which is tunnel vision.

Tunnel vision refers to the tendency to focus almost exclusively on one particular stimulus or event, and shut out most of what is going on around you. In some ways, this is an adaptive response – when things are falling apart around you, it may be possible to process all of the incoming information, and developing a narrow field of focus may keep one from being overwhelmed. Because there has been little or no opportunity to psychologically prepare for a disaster, stimulus overload of this type is particularly likely.

Tunnel vision is not the only, and not necessarily the most common response to an unforeseen disaster, but it is indicative of a general theme that is important to understand. When people are faced with usually severe stress, they are likely to respond in ways that reduces the immediate threat and stress, even if that response is not a very adaptive one in the long run.

Individuals in Organizations

Individuals who are faced with a disaster often react in ways that are maladaptive, or at least ineffective. On the other hand, organizations (which can be thought of as conglomerates of individuals) often react swiftly, decisively and well. It is useful to understand why.

Members of organizations often have well-defined roles that tell them what to do in an emergency, who is responsible for what, what resources are available, etc. Organizations not only provide structure, they also provide a realistic possible of an effective response in a situation where any individual, working on his or her own, would not feel confident of success. It is common to make fun of bureaucracies, but it is the very structure that the classic bureaucracy represents that allows individuals to face and conquer dangers and challenges that would overwhelm individuals acting in the absence of this structure. One of the many reasons organizations invest in preparing for disasters is that this give the members of each organization time and practice in mastering the requirements of their individual job roles, and the opportunity to practice working together.