Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Just like after Hurricane Andrew and the Indonesian tsunami, people are wondering why we haven't returned everything to normal yet after Hurricane Katrina. After all, we've had nearly .a whole week. My experiences in Kurdistan in 1991 and Bosnia in 1996 taught me just how complex relief operations are. Americans have the idea that the disaster hits on Tuesday, FEMA arrives on Wednesday, they cut the check on Thursday, the builders show up on Friday, and life is back to normal in time for the weekend. It is just plain physically impossible for things to move that fast.
When a large scale disaster strikes, it will take at least a couple of days for relief workers even to reach the area, and many more days for them to reach every part of the affected area. It will take a few more days after that for supplies to begin arriving. Not only do the supplies and transportation have to be organized on the shipping end, but secure offloading and distribution sites have to be set up on the receiving end. Just tossing supplies out of airplanes or trucks makes for dramatic news footage but it's wasteful and ineffective. Evacuating refugees will create worse problems than it solves unless there is a safe place with adequate supplies to send them. The bottom line is that in any disaster, people need to realize they may have to sustain themselves for at least a week before they can start to count on outside aid. That will be true regardless how advanced our technology gets because a good succinct definition of "disaster" is "no technology."
Why does it seem like we can ship supplies so much faster to foreign disasters? The main reason is that we really don't have news media in the U.S., we have a subsidiary of the entertainment industry that views its mission as providing novelty, shock, and amusement instead of information. So when a foreign disaster strikes, the cameras don't start rolling until the supplies arrive. Viewers don't see the days or even weeks of preparations that lead up to a relief effort. Second, even when the news media do cover a developing crisis, most people don't pay any attention until it becomes headline news. So it looks like relief just pops magically out of the ground, like mushrooms.
But it seems like we can do so much better in war. Not so. I met soldiers in Bosnia who had spent two weeks sleeping in their vehicles when they first arrived, and who didn't get a shower for six. My team arrived a month later and we still spent ten days in a tent in the mud, scrounging wood and cardboard to make a dry floor. And we came prepared. We had it good; I only went two weeks before my first shower. While the news media were buzzing about the possibility of war with Iraq, the military was spending weeks moving supplies; even so the war went through supplies like a chain saw. There's nothing dramatic about moving supplies, so most viewers never see it on the evening news and they get the idea that supplies just teleport instantly wherever they're needed.
Anyone who doubts the broadcast media have lost their last shreds of integrity should watch the stories that came out of the New Orleans Convention Center recently. We were treated to views of angry refugees while reporters ranted about the inefficiency of the relief efforts. You'd never get the idea that thousands of people are moving supplies and clearing roads, real information that could have at least reassured victims that help was on the way. We also heard the label "Third World conditions," a label that was absolutely true. What defines the Third World is the absence of modern technology. Think about that next time the NIMBY's oppose a power plant, a power line, or a wind farm.
The quality of the debate over Hurricane Katrina was neatly summarized by a letter on September 21 that disputed my claims that it takes time for help to arrive in any disaster. The writer dismissed my first-hand experiences and simply asserted that disasters in the U.S. should take less time to assist than distant ones. A blocked road will stop movement just as effectively in Louisiana as in Indonesia, and will take just as long to deal with, regardless of which party is in the White House.
My earlier letter dealt solely with the logistical difficulty of getting aid to disasters, but my critic worked in global warming and the PCB cleanup in the Fox River. Apparently, in some political circles, irrelevancies and unsupported assertions are considered legitimate logic.
Hurricane Rita, a smaller disaster than Katrina, is spawning the same kinds of complaints, and the Red Cross has been criticized for its response. The single most important lesson Americans need to learn from Katrina and Rita is that disasters are inherently chaotic and they will create Third World conditions for a while. For the media and political opportunists to create expectations to the contrary is cynical and exploitive.
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Created 21 January, 2003, Last Update 24 May, 2020
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