Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [28]
Like a lot of disaster researchers, Mileti is perpetually disappointed. Luckily, he also has a sense of humor. After he says something particularly provocative, he laughs with a loud bark, showing off unnaturally white, straight teeth. When he is asked to give speeches, which is often, he sometimes shows up in a Hawaiian shirt. Then he unleashes sweeping condemnations and calls to action. For all these reasons, in the small and sometimes tedious world of disaster research, Mileti has something of a cult following.
In July of 2006, at the annual disaster summit held at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Mileti appeared at a panel titled “Risk-Wise Behavior.” The auditorium was packed with 440 disaster experts. Mileti, who spoke last, was the only one without a PowerPoint presentation. He just got up and started ranting. “How many people do you need to see pounding through their roofs before we tell them how high the floodwaters can be, how hard the ground can shake? How many citizens must die to get us to do it?” he nearly shouted. “If you can’t create the political will, do it anyway.” The crowd went crazy.
As a smoker, Mileti likes to point out that the nation does take some risks seriously: “Do you know how many no-smoking signs you see in an airport? We’ve just not chosen to do the same thing for natural disasters,” he said. “Why can’t we put up signs that say, ‘This is a tsunami inundation zone’ [along the coast] of California? If we’re not doing it for other hazards, I say take the no-smoking signs out of the airport.”
Later, over hamburgers next to the Boulder Creek, Mileti rattled off other counterexamples: “You know how everyone knows not to take an elevator in a fire? How did that happen? In Hawaii, it’s now part of the culture to get to high ground if you feel an earthquake. It should be the same in Santa Monica. You need to acculturate a tsunami warning system.” Like most people at the workshop, Mileti was heartbroken by Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe that did not have to happen. Unlike some of the younger attendees, Mileti fully expects to be heartbroken again. “We know exactly—exactly—where the major disasters will occur,” he says, smiling. “But individuals underperceive risk. The public totally discounts low-probability, high-consequence events. The individual says, it’s not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.”
We still measure risk with the ancient slide rule that worked for most of our evolutionary history, even though we have calculators at our side. Likewise, we still eat chocolate cake even though we no longer need to hoard calories. But we can learn to eat less cake, and it is possible to become better judges of risk.
So how do we override our worst instincts? First and most important, the people in charge of warning us should treat us with respect. It’s surprising how rarely warnings explain why you should do something, not just what you should do. Once you start noticing this problem, you’ll see it everywhere. In fact, I think that the mistakes the public makes in calculating risk are primarily due to this pervasive lack of trust on behalf of the people charged with protecting us. They are our escorts through Extremistan, but they don’t level with us often enough.
For example, you have heard flight attendants explain how to put on an oxygen mask, should it drop down from the ceiling of the plane. “Secure your own mask before helping others,” the warning goes. But the flight attendant does not tell you why. Imagine if you were told that, in the event of a rapid decompression, you would only have ten to fifteen seconds before you lost consciousness. Aha. Then you might understand why you should put your mask on before you help your child. You might understand that if you don’t put your mask on first,