Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [77]
When Katrina came, it swept all of Grand Bayou away. There was literally nothing left but battered boats and scraps of metal—the ruins of a fine civilization. Since then Philippe has moved nine times. Now she lives about an hour and a half from her old home, hoping to one day go back. Ironically, she is now in more danger than she ever was. The community has scattered across many states, and Philippe and her daughter live in a FEMA trailer.
But the citizens of Grand Bayou intend to come back. The first house was finished in July 2007. All the houses will be “soft-build”—simple wooden structures that are cheap to rebuild. The community is still fighting to restore the wetlands and create a more sustainable civilization. But in the meantime, they plan to evacuate with each storm and then clean up the mess, as they always have. “We try to protect life, that’s the most important thing,” says Philippe. She now thinks that the population of Grand Bayou will be bigger after Katrina than it was before. “I know that we’re going to survive,” she says. “We’ve learned to depend upon each other.”
A Tale of Two Cities
Places like Grand Bayou are models of resilience because the residents proactively help one another survive. They value their community more than their possessions, and they also trust the group’s collective decisions. But that is a rare accomplishment in the modern era of large cities and anonymous neighbors. It is certainly the goal, but it is not the only option.
There are smaller, simpler forms of resilience. Sometimes the groups that survive disasters are the ones that preserve a single piece of vital information. One lesson, widely shared, can make all the difference, a fact both heartbreaking and hopeful. Life and death shouldn’t be determined based on the preservation of one fact. But if it is, at least we know it is eminently possible to do better.
The 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia killed an estimated two hundred thousand people. The real number is bigger or smaller; it was literally too big to count. The missing pictures in local newspapers went on for pages and pages, on and on, until it seemed there must have been some kind of printing mistake.
A crushing wall of seawater seems like one situation in which death is nonnegotiable. And it’s true: for many of the victims, there was literally no chance of avoiding death—barring a sophisticated, multinational warning system, which the Indian Ocean did not have. But for thousands of people, the best warning system was old and homemade.
Consider two cities, both very close to the epicenter of the earthquake that set off the 2004 tsunami. Jantang was a coastal village on the northern coast of Sumatra. The residents felt the ground shake, and about twenty minutes later, a roaring wave swept their lives away. The water reached heights of forty-five to sixty feet. All of the village’s structures were destroyed. Over 50 percent of the people were killed.
Langi, on the island of Simeulue, was even closer to the quake. Islanders had just eight minutes after the ground shook to get to high ground—the shortest interval between earthquake and tsunami anywhere and too fast for a buoy-based warning system, had there been one. Waves there reached thirty to forty-five feet—slightly less than the height in Jantang, but still decidedly deadly. As in Jantang, all the town’s buildings were decimated.
But in Langi, 100 percent of the eight-hundred-person population survived. No one—not a child, not a grandmother—was lost, as Lori Dengler, a geology professor from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, discovered when she visited in April of 2005. Why? In Langi, when the ground shook, everyone left for higher ground—and stayed there for a while. That was the tradition, no matter what. In 1907, the island had experienced a tsunami, which locals say killed about 70 percent of the population. And the survivors had passed this lesson on through the generations