Every year tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters wreak havoc with America's communities, destroying homes and businesses and causing billions of dollars worth of damage. The costs of natural hazards average as much as $1 billion a week and shortsighted development policies may cause outlays to keep rising, a new study warned.
"We are responsible for the losses in future disasters -- it is not God, it is not nature -- because we make the decisions on what to put in harm's way," said Dennis S. Mileti, a University of Colorado sociologist who led a team of 132 experts who authored the report, Disasters By Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States.
According to Mileti, major catastrophes are getting larger and will continue to get larger, partly because of what Americans have done in the past to reduce risk. "For example, building a dam or levee may protect a community from the small- and medium sized floods the structures were designed to handle. But additional development that occurs because of this protection will mean even greater losses during a big flood that causes the dam or levee to fail," he said.
Mileti points to the chain of dams and levees built along the Mississippi River. They were able to contain most floods, but the system was not designed to work together, and in the great floods of 1993 some levees broke and trapped water in highly developed communities, making the damage worse. "Many of the accepted methods for coping with hazards have been based on the idea that people can use technology to control nature to make them safe," he said.
Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering Directorate, the five-year, $750,000 study team was asked to evaluate what is known about natural hazards and come up with ways to reduce their social and economic costs. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also contributed funding.
The report says that while disasters often are predictable, research has shown that people "plan only for the immediate future, overestimate their ability to cope when disaster strikes and rely heavily on emergency relief." But communities aren't coping and emergency relief cannot accommodate the growing costs of disasters. Natural hazards over the last twenty years have cost the United States more than $500 billion and the toll is rising, due to more costly and complex structures and more people moving to disaster-prone areas.
Mileti, who chairs the sociology department and directs the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, noted that seven of the 10 most costly U.S. disasters occurred between 1989 and 1994. The states of California, Texas and Florida experienced the greatest losses from natural hazards during the study period from 1975 to 1994 as the development boom extended across the country. To help alleviate the costs, the report recommends preparing for disasters, making long-term plans, limiting where development can occur and involving the entire community in preparations.
While most disasters are related to weather and climate -- such as drought, flooding, dust storms, ice storms, hurricanes and tornadoes -- more infrequent catastrophes like earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are sometimes the most expensive.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, at more than $25 billion, was the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Japan's 1995 Kobe earthquake, at $100 billion, was the world's most expensive disaster.
The U.S. has managed to reduce deaths and injuries from hurricanes over the past two decades, but casualties from floods -- the nation's most frequent and injurious natural hazard -- have been reduced significantly. Deaths from lightning and tornadoes have remained constant.
Mileti said that America needs to take responsibility for containing disasters by designing systems that can handle the worst events, or by understanding the potential damage of development near known disaster areas and accepting the loss when it happens. The report urges community leaders to "design future disasters" for their communities, actually setting the number of deaths and injuries and dollar losses that could result so that communities are aware of the risks and residents can decide how to prepare for them or whether they want to take the risk at all.
"We need to change the culture to think about designing communities for our great grandchildren's children's children," Mileti said.