Interview with Dennis S. Mileti
Interview
Dennis S. MiletiProfessor Emeritus University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Vice Chair, California Seismic Safety Commission
for the New Zealand Earthquake Commission
February 12, 2007
1.What key lessons have been learned from recent disasters in America and from Cyclone Katrina in particular?
I was happy to be part of a group with the American Society of Civil Engineers who commented on causes and consequences of the levee failures in New Orleans as a result of Cyclone Katrina. The key lessons learned were clear:
- Keep safety at the forefront of public priorities. No single authority ever defined what was to be expected in terms of protection performance and loss of life. Compromises in protection were made based on cost and other conflicting priorities. Neglect and inaction resulted from the infrequency of mega-events.
- Quantify the risks. We must assess and communicate to decision makers and the public how risk and cost/benefit tradeoffs impact performance and public safety. A high priority is to perform risk quantifications that target decision making by geographical area. Risk analyses must be updated since risk changes with time and changes in the natural and man-made environments.
- Communicate risks to the public and decide how much risk is acceptable. Give the public a voice in decisions about the risk under which they live. Governments should create and maintain quality risk communication programs since without them people will gradually forget. These programs should be the type that results in acceptable levels of public knowledge, risk perceptions, and household mitigation and preparedness.
- Rethink the approach from a systems viewpoint that combines constructed protection with other loss reduction strategies. Design conditions can not be static over time. Design must include/be part of a broader strategy that includes other tools, e.g., wise land use, preparedness for public earning and protective action response, emergency response, recovery and reconstruction.
- Leaders should correct deficiencies in constructed protection with urgency. Establish mechanisms to incorporate changing information about risk. Make key structures survivable. Retrofit killer structures.
- Put someone in charge. If complex programs are going to work, someone needs to be in charge. Protections can be dysfunctional it is evolves over time, is from numerous agencies, if on one can adjudicate conflicting priorities. Governments should agree to give a single person the responsibility for managing the entire approach. This person should be deeply engaged with all responsible agencies. Keep safety at the forefront of pubic priorities. Provide leadership, vision, l definition of roles and responsibilities, formalized avenues of communication, prioritization of funding, and coordination.
- Improve inter-agency coordination. A lack of coordination between local, state, and federal agencies results in organization confusion. Strong and sustainable mechanisms for inter-agency communication, cooperation, and coordination are needed to overcome this confusion. All agencies involved in hazards mitigation and preparedness should implement more effective mechanisms for coordination and cooperation.
- Upgrade engineering design procedures. Engineering design practices should place greater emphasis on performance. More research is needed on the design and construction of better performing structures, and findings should be implemented. The latest technological advances should be used to improve models, designs, retrofits, and maintenance.
- Bring in independent experts. Independent expert review is needed for all public work projects where performance is critical to public health, safety, and welfare; performance under extreme emergency conditions is critical; innovative materials or techniques are used; there is a lack of redundancy in design; there is unique construction sequencing or a short/overlapping design-construction schedule.
- Place safety first. Every engineered project has funding and schedule constraints, must integrate into the natural and man-made environments, and has political ramification. In the face of pressure to save money or to make up time, engineers must hold true to the requirements of the profession's canon of ethics and never compromise public safety. Organization must be structured to enable the "focus on safety" rather than inhibit it. Engineers must always consider how the performance of individual components affects overall system performance.
2. Can these lessons be applied to other parts of the world?
Many of them can, and many of them can apply to almost any hazard we might wish to consider.
3. You have visited New Zealand a number of times. Do you have any observations you can make about disaster risk and management in this country.
Yes I can, and I'm quite happy to have the opportunity to speak out on this topic. New Zealand has the most appropriate approach for addressing natural hazards I have encountered anywhere in the world. The New Zealand perspective correctly links hazards mitigation to environmental management and the broad goal of sustainable development. This is exactly where natural hazards management belongs since natural disasters are the result of human development practices and not nature. Thought about how to manage human decisions in ways consistent with the risk imposed by the natural lands that your country has to occupy is perfectly placed, and excellent ideas are the result. In fact, I often point to your nation as an example of how to manage natural hazards correctly. Unfortunately, however, implementing many of the good ideas that New Zealanders have about managing risk is often thwarted by the sparse national funds. But, then, perhaps it is the latter that is at the source of the abundance of the former.
4. How difficult is it to educate people about hazards in this age of information overload?
It's not difficult at all, but it requires that public education efforts follow a particular formant that acknowledges how human beings are wired. The social science research record on what a public education campaign should look like in order to result in actual increases in household mitigation and preparedness is clear. Public education that follows those principles work to increase household readiness, public education that doesn't follow those principles doesn't. In short, public education that works in ongoing (not a singular or set of individual acts); it use multiple channels of communication to reach the same people; it makes full use of a range of communication modes, e.g., a written brochure, programs in schools, advertisements on television and over the radio, and so on. The key element is, however, to target the social process that leads up to people mitigating and preparing, and that's to get them to start talking about it with others and make their own decisions about what to do. Consequently, public education that works isn't hard to do; but it is hard to create an ongoing commitment across many organizational actors to coordinate their public education activities and buy into doing it over the long haul.
5. Are some people more open to such education than others and if so why?
Yes, of course. But they are a rare breed and the exception rather than the rule. It takes a lot to convince human beings that they really aren't safe and that we live on an unsafe planet. The average person grabs information and even mis-information that matches their "preference" which is to believe that a natural disaster won't happen in their neighborhood (for example, as long as they live there), and that, if it does happen, they won't be the ones to die, be injured, or be negatively impacted economically. However, all human beings can be presented with information (in adequately designed public education campaign) that can change their natural inclination to ignore high consequence low probability events and to take steps to mitigate and prepare.
6. Does disaster management tend to take a rear-view mirror approach? In other words, is there a tendency for it to focus on what has happened (and prepare for a repeat of such events) rather than to focus on what is likely to happen?
Yes it certainly does. One really must consider the broader system in which contemporary societies exist to understand this phenomenon. Most democratic western societies are victims of political economies that focus on growth and short-term profits. These goals push natural hazards and disaster to the back seat. When disasters do occur, those same systems document "lessons learned" (as if we didn't know those lessons before the event happened), and they respond by doing things to use those lessons. It is this very mechanism that has us focus on the last disaster experienced and not the ones we face. To do the latter would require that a society push rational hazards management ahead of their political economy. This would require putting long-term goals ahead of short-term profits. It's a rare society, indeed, that would take this approach; and in fact, I don't know of any that have. This could be one of the reasons that natural disasters continue to become larger and larger.
7. As a corollary of the above, is it likely that we will now see a focus on climate-related events (and climate change in particular) at the expense of seismic events?
I think that depends on the nation you're in. For example, the U.S. remains focused on the hazards of terrorism at the expense of natural hazards. Although Cyclone Katrina did provide a wake-up call for many, many of the practices needed to move natural hazards management forward that the U.S. abandoned after September 11th have not yet been put back in place. Impacting or reversing, in some appreciable way, the path that at least the U.S. is on regarding climate change would require national actions that would disturb the current distribution of wealth, e.g., reducing the wealth of those who own fossil fuels. Human history just isn't filled with examples of powerful people making decisions that result in their loosing wealth or power.
Regarding the seismic hazard, at least in the U.S., there has been a positive impact of the federal de-emphasis of natural hazards such as earthquakes. For example, the State of California is seizing the opportunity to own and manage its own seismic risk independent of federal policies and programs. But, then, California has long sought to address and manage its seismic hazard, it's just perceived to be more important to do so now that before September 11th.