The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters

CHAPTER 1
Shrink the Targets
Disasters from natural sources, from industrial and technological sources, and from deliberate sources such as terrorism have all increased in the United States in recent decades, and no diminution is in sight.1 Weather disturbances are predicted to increase; low-level industrial accidents continue but threaten to intensify and the threat of cyber attacks on our "critical infrastructure" becomes ever more credible; foreign terrorists have not relaxed and we anxiously await another attack. Cataclysmic fantasies proliferate on movie screens and DVDs, and scholars write books with "collapse," "catastrophe," "our final hour," and "worst cases" in their titles.
But we have neglected a fundamental response to the trio of disaster sources. Instead of focusing only on preventing disasters and coping with their aftermath--which we must continue to do--we should reduce the size of vulnerable targets. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) already litter our landscape; terrorists need not sneak them in, and they are more likely to be triggered by natural and industrial disasters than by terrorists. Ninety-ton tank cars of chlorine gas are WMDs that travel daily through our cities; dispersing the deadly gas via a tornado or hurricane, an industrial accident, or a terrorist's suitcase bomb would endanger up to seven million people. New Orleans and its surroundings is, or was, our largest port, but it could have been a target one-third the size of its pre-Katrina population of some 450,000 souls, and much easier to defend and evacuate. Because of the increased concentration of the electric power industry, our vital electric power grid is so poorly managed that sagging power lines hitting tree branches in Ohio plunged the Northeast into darkness for hours and even days in some areas in 2003. The industry has made its grid a better target for a heat spell, a flood, a hurricane, or a few well-placed small bombs. Deconcentrating the industry would uncouple the vulnerabilities and barely decrease efficiency, as we shall see.
Not all of the dangers confronting us can be reduced through downsizing our targets. Some natural hazards we just have to face: we are unlikely to stop settling in earthquake zones, nor can we avoid tsunamis, volcanoes, asteroids, or even tornadoes. Even small targets are at risk in the case of epidemics, and terrorists with biological and radiological weapons can cause such widespread devastation that the size of the target is irrelevant.
But, except for tornadoes, all these are rare. Devastations from the more common sources such as high winds, water and fire damage, industrial and technological accidents, and terrorist attacks on large targets can be greatly reduced. It will not be easy, but given our yearly disaster bill in the billions of dollars, it makes economic sense as well as social sense. It will require a change in our mind-set about markets and regulation. Since our current mindset is only decades old--it changed quickly from the 1970s on--it is hardly inconceivable that it could not change again.
Disasters expose our social structure and culture more sharply than other important events. (Clarke 2005) They reveal starkly the failure of organizations, regulations, and the political system. But we regard disasters as exceptional events, and after a disaster we shore up our defenses and try to improve our responses while leaving the target in place. However, as Clarke persuasively argues, disasters are not exceptional but a normal part of our existence. To reduce their damage will require probing our social structure and culture to see how these promote our vulnerabilities. We will do this throughout this book in the hope of prodding changes in these areas.
Two of the major themes in this work are the inevitable failure of organizations, public and private, to protect us from disasters and the increasing concentration of targets that make the disasters more consequential. There are many explanations for the first theme, organizational failures, but we will highlight one in particular: organizations are tools that can be used for ends other than their official ones. To prevent unwarranted use, we require regulation in the private sector and representative governance in the public sectors. The failure of the political system means ineffective regulation. This can be changed.
One goal of regulation is to prevent the accumulation of economic power in private hands. Otherwise, we get the concentration not just of economic power but of hazardous materials, populations in risky areas with inadequate protection, and vulnerabilities in parts of our critical infrastructure such as the Internet, electric power, transportation, and agriculture.