David Black - What to Do When the Shit Hits the Fan: 2014-2015 Edition

Copyright 2014 by David Black

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62636-109-6
eISBN: 978-1-62873-881-0

Printed in the United States of America

What constitutes a disaster for a person experiencing it is going to be relative to a number of factors: that persons background and lifestyle, his or her financial situation, the nature of the event, where he or she is when the event occurs, and how well that person has prepared for catastrophic events.

Disaster is commonly defined as an event causing widespread destruction and distress. A grave misfortune. A crisis event that surpasses the ability of an individual, community, or society to control or recover from its consequences.

Disasters are often divided into two categories, natural and man-made. Natural disasters include earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, cyclones and hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and slope failures. We are essentially powerless against these events except for mitigation and effective response; natural disasters often produce horrific effects well outside the immediate area they first occur in. During these events, impoverished areas suffer grossly higher death tolls due to their architectural inferiorities and defects in their health care systems. After the main event, disease and famine often follow.

The three big killers are flooding, famine, and infectious disease. They often work in brutal combination. Aside from the initial drownings, floods mix sewage and waste with the local drinking water. Rotting corpses add to the pollution and disease inventory. Gastrointestinal diseases run rampant, commonly leading to severe dehydration (e.g. cholera), which, in turn, cannot be relieved adequately because of the lack of clean water.

Infectious disease is an interesting villain that tends to emerge in a wide area over a long period of time. Outbreaks are not often treated as disasters until the media picks ups on the situation, and then public opinion forces government officials to take action. By the time the full gravity of the situation is realized, the disease can be out of control.

Man-made disasters are those caused by humans through negligence, technological failure, fanaticism, or sheer meanness. These disasters include war, structure fires, civil unrest, building collapse, industrial accidents, transportation accidents, and hazardous material incidents. As we urbanize and our capacity to produce, store, and transport hazardous materials and technologies grows, so does the potential intensity of a disaster.

For most North Americans a disaster is something nasty that happens to somebody else. Thats our attitude, and people in other parts of the world know it and resent it. Most of us living in the Western World, especially those of us from the US and Canada, are spoiled and exceptionally prosperous. Our poorest are considered blessed compared to the average person in Third World countries. Our prosperous lives and governments shield us from discomfort and discontinuity. The sheer size, geographic diversity, and wealth of our nation makes catastrophes seem like somebody elses problem, not ours. When a hurricane in New Orleans laid the city bare and killed a thousand people, the rest of us watched it in decadent comfort, snacking in luxury on the sofas in front of our big-screen LED TVs. Video from the Indian Ocean tsunami kept us captivated for weeks. We are a complacent and distracted group of generations, easily entertained by the horrific events that others go through.

In the early 2000s I made several trips to the Republic of Georgia to present disaster management training to mid-level government officials and to develop a cadre of community emergency response trainers. On the final evening of one trip during the traditional dinner for the departing guest, after endless toasts and lots of wine, one politicians wife looked across the table at me and asked Have you ever been in a real disaster? It was a skeptical ambush that caught me off guard. Like a drowning man with his life flashing before his eyes, my memory raced through dozens of bloody scenarios I had encountered as a firefighter and paramedic, desperately searching for something that would qualify as a disaster in her eyes. The Georgians were in a perpetual financial crisis.

Poverty was extreme and rampant. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the countrys infrastructure was in complete shambles. Healthcare was primitive and inaccessible to most. Terrorism, invasion, corruption, and civil war loomed on the horizon. These people knew hardship; it was painfully obvious that hotel fires and simple multi-casualty incidents that killed a few rich people and took a couple of days to clean up would not qualify as disasters here. I suddenly fell victim to survivor guilt.

For most of us its time to wake up. Here are some searing truths about disaster and catastrophe: events since the turn of the century should remind us that even in our protected cocoons of technological sophistication and group prosperity, we are virtually powerless in the face of the laws of science and human psychology. We humans, regardless of where we live, are constantly on the verge of one disaster or another. From earthquakes to tsunamis, asteroids to pandemics, nuclear war to computer terrorism, disasters are a constant threat; for people in many parts of the world they are almost a daily occurrence.

Here in the United States we have not been visited by major disasters since the World Wars and the flu pandemic of 1919. Small disasters yes, but nothing major, and were getting spoiled by it. For the younger generation in particular, our relationship with disasters is more about entertainment than preparation. Our media is overflowing with war games, disaster movies, living-dead zombies and vampires. Reality shows expose us for what we are: whiney spoiled brats who think a disaster is when our hair is out of place or we dont get invited to a party. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesnt take us seriously. Sooner or later, though, the odds are that it will all catch up to us. Somewhere out there lurking is the new most horrible disaster ever, and it could happen here in America just as easily as anywhere else.

Lets take a look at some real modern disasters. Well stick with events that have occurred since 1900.

First on the list is war, and for our purposes well list World War I and II together. Starting in 1914 until the Japanese surrender in 1945, this disaster resulted in the deaths of 70 million people, most of them civilians. It included some amazingly cruel stuff: the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Wilhelm Gustloff, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The effects of these disasters will linger for centuries. Lesson learned: man has developed the technology for instant genocide and is not afraid to use it.