Learning from Disasters the Hard Way
Natural disasters occur around the world with enough annual frequency that we as a global community should be learning from our shortcomings and tragic experiences of the past. The unfortunate reality is that disaster preparation is often lacking in terms of both infrastructure preparedness and post disaster response. Obviously, there is no such thing as absolute disaster preparedness and if an event is severe enough, no amount of planning and building reinforcement can prevent destruction. The important distinction, however, is that some disasters can be better anticipated and mitigated.
Collective disaster planning often comes up short, but is renewed and intensified in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. Like many realities in life, full awareness often doesn’t come until after the fact and the importance of preparation and investment before a disaster is only realized once one strikes. Sometimes it takes a cataclysmic event to highlight systemic weaknesses or just wake us up to pay attention to the destructive potential of nature.
Anticipating Destruction
Thinking about natural disasters and our responses is not a pleasant thing to consider. It is, unfortunately, necessary. Rather than burying our heads in the sand and pretending that the many devastating disasters that strike around the world won’t ever come for us, we should keep a healthy anticipation for extreme weather and calamitous events. Its easy to forget about the importance of planning and investment in large scale preparedness measures in fair weather. Even areas afflicted with regular disasters like flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes succomb to this mild complacency. Understanding, of course, that you can’t live your life in paranoia over the next seismic movement of heavy rainfall, it is nonetheless important to maintain a healthy awareness and anticipation about disasters.
Forecasting a Better Response
When it comes to natural disaster, its a good approach to assume that we are always and always will be underprepared. This is ok. No one can foresee everything and even the best prepared places can be leveled by a powerful storm or other such event. The problem emerges when we begin disregarding the potential of natural disasters in favor of short term political and economic interests, such as building more homes along an active fault or failing to invest in improvements to levees and floodwalls. These kinds of things constitute the easily overlooked, preventative steps that are involved in disaster preparation.
It is true that many cities and regions in the U.S, Canada, and worldwide have taken huge steps to improve their infrastructure and build more resistant cities and better prepare populations for disasters, but there still remains a lot to do. Emphasizing safer metro areas, advancing weather forecasting and early warning systems, and informing people on what to do and not to do before, during, and after a disaster will go a long way toward advancing awareness and avoiding the relearning of the hard learned lessons of disasters past. As a global community, disasters affect all of us in some way, so we should be organizing to prepare and overcome them with common interests and goals in mind.
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