We Cannot Prevent Disasters

Inside My Canoehead

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The world is a complex place, any number of interwoven dependent events occur daily, many with little impact on the human experience, some with devastating effects. Hazards exist and are realized largely, but not completely, due to events beyond the control of humanity. We do not cause hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, storm surges and floods. We do contribute to the number of wildfires annually and we undoubtedly are responsible for human caused events, like industrial accidents. Where the intersection of a natural hazard and humanity does lead to loss is the decisions we make, by placing expensive things in precarious locations, a natural event like an earthquake will take down a building not build to withstand the event.
However, there is an argument for mitigation, to lessen the impact of realized natural hazards on our ecosystem. The word mitigation is represents a spectrum of options, a reduction in exposure to and loss from an event beyond our control. A number of possible investments lead to varying degrees of increased mitigation and lower potential losses. We cannot move humanity away from natural hazards, but we can understand their likely impacts and then choose options to lessen the loss and future economic burden.
One significant barrier remains the public perception that disasters are preventable, that pathways exist to stop an event from occurring. The challenge with the world prevention is that it is a binary expression - to prevent or not, you cannot partially prevent something, when that occurs you are mitigating, not preventing. While this seems a novel point not worthy of a blog to argue, when something is preventable, society seeks blame and assigns responsibility. When events occur that lead to losses and event death, most of the inquiry is to understand why it happened, who is responsible and how to prevent it from happening in the future. We cannot stop any number of natural hazards from being realized, nor can we stop them from leading to economic losses and death. We can however mitigate the loss so that less economic harm is caused, making recovery less expensive for the collective society and reduce the number of casualties. But zero is never an option, we are not moving humanity to "higher ground", hence prevention in emergency management is mitigation.

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