disaster

While the catastrophic flooding by Hurricane Florence made recent headlines, the emotional trauma it caused — particularly for children — may be overlooked. A growing approach to natural disasters as “social phenomena” with social consequences sheds light on how storms, earthquakes, and wildfires impact the emotional health of young survivors. In a recent article in The Atlantic, sociologist Alice Fothergill discusses her research on the emotional turmoil caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Fothergill finds that lack of communication with friends and family during a storm leads to tremendous anxiety for children. However, children who stay together with family in unsafe conditions also suffer. She explains,

“In a lot of studies, we find that kids who experience the intensity of the event do have a harder time coping. It really is important to evacuate and not be in it. Being with family is important, [but so is] not feeling like they’re in a life-threatening situation.”

The good news is, emergency responders are learning. Fothergill notes that during Hurricane Katrina, many kids in foster families and their biological parents completely lost contact and family records were destroyed in the storm. However, during Hurricane Sandy, the Department of Children and Families in New Jersey was able to learn from these mistakes.

Fothergill says one of the best things to do is to allow children to help prepare for the storm — for example, let them have a say in what comes in the car and what stays at home — so they feel like they have some control over the situation. While Fothergill notes that children are especially vulnerable to trauma, they are also very resilient; for this reason, showing them how to prepare and rebuild after a deadly storm can make all the difference.

The National Weather Service estimates that Hurricane Florence dropped over 8 trillion gallons of rain across North Carolina, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just started evaluating how much damage was done. While Hurricane Florence and other natural disasters impact thousands of lives every year, not all groups recover equally. Recent research reported by Mic reveals that non-white households tend to lose wealth after a natural disaster, while white households often profit.

Tracking families from 1999 to 2013, sociologists Junia Howell and Jim Elliot found that white families in the most disaster-hit counties gained $126,000 in wealth on average over the 14 years of the study. By contrast, Back, Latinx, and Asian families in the same counties lost $27,000, $29,000 and $10,000 respectively. “Put another way, whites accumulate more wealth after natural disasters while residents of color accumulate less,” Elliot explained.

After a natural disaster, FEMA provides grants and low-interest loans to offset the cost of property damage. While it would make sense that federal disaster relief would mitigate racial disparity, Howell and Elliot’s research shows that it actually makes it worse. Counties receiving the most FEMA aid experienced the starkest widening of the racial wealth gap. Black families in counties that received the least FEMA aid accumulated $82,000 more wealth on average than Black families in counties that received the most aid. The researchers tried to explain this puzzling finding:

“Based on previous work on disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, we know FEMA aid is not equitably distributed across communities … When certain areas receive more redevelopment aid and those neighborhoods also are primarily white, racial inequality is going to be amplified.”

In other words, one potential explanation for this trend is that white communities within counties receiving federal aid tend to receive more investment for rebuilding after a disaster than non-white communities in the same county. And with climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, this discovery implies worsening racial wealth gaps in the future. However, Howell and Elliot see reason to be hopeful,

“The good news is that if we develop more equitable approaches to disaster recover, we can not only better tackle that problem but also help build a more just and resilient society.”

Intimate depictions of human suffering often make headlines. When 12 young boys became stuck in a cave in Thailand for over two weeks, media across the globe dedicated extensive coverage to their precarious rescue. In an interview with Vox, sociologist Tim Recuber explains why so many people watch coverage of disasters. According to Recuber, the key to this puzzle is “empathetic hedonism.” Recuber explains,

“There’s a certain kind of pleasure in really feeling for someone else, even if those feeling are bad. That’s what that term is trying to name. In a culture that tries to venerate empathy, being able to say, ‘I saw that footage, it’s really horrible, I feel horrible for those kids’…it does mark you as a moral person…People get to demonstrate they have this ability.”

However, not all victims of disaster receive the same level of empathy. People generally feel more empathy towards people they can relate to:

“Empathy is really partial. We’re more inclined to be empathetic to people who we feel are like us. Identifiable victims, relatable victims. And oftentimes racial, class, and gender biases get in the way of empathetic identification. There are even studies that show that people viewing a person’s skin being pricked by a needle will have more of a [physiological] reaction when the skin is the same color as theirs.”

In his interview, Recuber also grapples with the ethics of such media consumption. What may be most important, he concludes, is to allow victims the agency to decide whether or not to be in the spotlight. Recuber finds no harm in caring about suffering kids, but cautions that privacy invasions can deepen trauma.

Though I am more than happy to trade in my blue jeans and boots for shorts and flip-flops, not everything warm weather brings is welcome.  As the Bemidji Pioneer reminds us, warm weather also brings tornado season.

For years, weather experts have been working on cutting-edge technology to detect tornados.  But, when city sirens wail and weather warnings flash across the bottom of t.v. screens, people are generally slow to take cover.   In fact, many studies have shown that people often spend time looking for more information about the potential tornado rather than hitting their basements.  According to Dennis Mileti, a sociologist and retired director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder,

“People turn into information vampires when they hear their town and village might be struck by a violent tornado…And if you don’t provide them with the information they need, what you’re actually doing is guaranteeing the time people spend searching is longer rather than shorter.”

In addition, many people get into the mindset that the warning is “just another warning.”  Tornado survivors are an exception, though, as they almost always respond more quickly to severe weather warnings.  But, as Mississippi State University Sociologist Laura Myers explains, the rest of us don’t learn from their experience.

Myers found that about 10 percent of the population are anxious about bad weather and take shelter at the first sign of danger. But, most respond to dangerous situations like a tornado warning with what she calls denial. “They’re sitting there saying, ‘OK, I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to have to worry about it. I want to assume everything is going to be OK.’ That’s why the person will wait for that secondary confirmation. They’ll say, ‘I’ve really gotta know it’s going to hit me.’”

Related, many don’t respond due to the prevalence of false alarms.  According to the National Weather Service, three out of four tornado warnings are false alarms.  Social scientists believe that just explaining that these were false alarms (for example, that a tornado formed but didn’t touch down) would help; otherwise, people often think they are just mistakes.

Because of this, the weather service is making an effort to utilize the knowledge of social scientists in order to understand the impact of warning systems.  This blending of physical and social science, combined with new technology and social media outlets, will change how tornado warnings reach us and, hopefully, save lives.

True/Slant recently parodied how reporting on the oil spill might look quite different “if sociologists wrote the news instead”:

Absent from the dialogue surrounding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which began on April 20, 2010 following an explosion that killed eleven workers, are the roles of class, race and especially gender. Due to the environmental devastation wrought by the catastrophe, which is likely to fall heaviest on the working poor, it is understandable that attention is largely focused on efforts to plug the oil well undertaken by British Petroleum, a corporation founded in imperial Britain to exploit the oil resources of people of color.

Read the rest.

Two recent failed terrorism attempts have some wondering if terrorists are losing their touch. Christian Science Monitor reports:

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen arrested and charged with the attempted attack, appears to have had little real training in explosives technique, according to US officials. And the Times Square bungle was preceded by the Christmas Day incident in which a Muslim Nigerian man on a Northwest Airlines flight tried, and failed, to ignite plastic explosives sewn into his underwear.

Are these twin flops evidence of systemic ineptitude? Perhaps. But it is at least as likely that they show Al Qaeda and its allies have moved towards a new, more decentralized, method of targeting the US and other Western nations.

Although the attacks on 9/11 were spectacular and highly destructive, experts note that typical terrorist attacks are generally less coordinated and more amateurish.

In a way, what the US is seeing now may be judged a return to more usual terrorist tactics.

After all, terrorism, by definition, is an attention-getting strategy employed by those without the ability to mount conventional military attacks.

Criminologist Gary LaFree explains:

“Terrorism is a tool of the less-powerful, and they use what they have at hand,” says Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The deadly successes of the 9/11 attacks perhaps have made Islamist terrorists appear more competent than they are, in general. Mr. LaFree counts some 50 or 60 thwarted attacks linked to Al Qaeda or its allies since 2001.

“Terrorists use readily available, low-tech weapons, and they often screw up,” says LaFree.

Also, yesterday the Chicago Tribune discussed whether disasters cause people to behave selfishly or altruistically.

When the ship is sinking is it really women and children first, or every man for himself? The answer, it seems, may depend on how fast it’s going down.

Comparing who survived two of history’s most famous sinkings — the Titanic and the Lusitania — indicates sharply different behavior on the two doomed vessels, neither of which had enough available lifeboats for all passengers.

When a torpedo sent the Lusitania to the bottom in just 18 minutes, claiming 1,198 lives, most survivors were young, fit people age 16 to 35 who could rush to a spot in the lifeboats and hang on to it.

By contrast, it took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to slip beneath the waves, time for people to consider what to do rather than just react. While 1,517 people perished, the survivors tended to be women, children and those accompanying a child.

Economist Benno Torgler led a study about how people act in extreme situations. He comments:

“In the environment of the Titanic, social norms were enforced more often, and there was also a higher willingness among males to surrender a seat on a lifeboat,” researcher Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia said of the findings.

Why might this be?

Torgler points to the “procreation instinct,” which holds that because the survival of a species depends on its offspring, a high value must be placed upon females of reproductive age as a valuable resource.

Aboard the Titanic, where social norms had time to come into play, women had a 53 percent higher probability of surviving than males, Torgler said. “But no (such) effect was observable in the Lusitania.”

The Titanic went down after colliding with an iceberg on the night of April 12, 1912. It was three years later, May 7, 1915, that a torpedo sank the Lusitania.

The researchers note that it is likely that those aboard the Lusitania were familiar with the Titanic disaster and that also might have affected their thinking more toward self-preservation.

A social psychologist weighs in:

Col. Thomas Kolditz, head of the department of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, said the researchers’ explanation for this behavior difference is plausible, “but they underestimate the role of leadership.” Competent leaders in dangerous situations influence people, but this takes time, said Kolditz, who was not part of the research team.

“It is unlikely that the mere passage of time led to the emergence of pro-social and selfless behaviors. It is much more likely that, in the case of the Titanic, leaders were able to impact the process of abandoning ship in a more direct way, whereas the effect of leadership was minimized in the fast-breaking circumstances on the Lusitania,” Kolditz said.

Additionally, social class affected survival chances in these disasters:

The study found a higher survival rate for first-class passengers on the Titanic, but not on the Lusitania, where first-class passengers fared even worse than third-class passengers in the scramble to exit the ship.

In the case of the Titanic, upper class passengers also had more time to assert the privilege to which they were accustomed, calling on the ships officers whom they knew and perhaps even bargaining for seats in the lifeboats.

Read more.

Despite rumors and media reports at the time, new research claims that Hurricane Katrina did not spawn waves of crime in other cities. As USA Today reports:

In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people…

The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. “Any increase in murder is intolerable,” Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.

Meanwhile, “Many communities across the United States … also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006,” notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.

The belief that rises in crime and disorder arise from disasters like Katrina is nothing new.

A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of “disaster myths” seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. “This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people’s resiliency after a disaster.”

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, “we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic.”

“Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors,” Trainor says. “People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part.”

The take home message?

“One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself,” Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.

“Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations,” Varano concludes. “There’s a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions.”

While drawing comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Haiti may be tempting, sociologist Kathleen Tierney tells CNN why doing so is not such a good idea.

Like Katrina, the earthquake has produced effects of catastrophic proportions. Both events rank among the largest catastrophes ever experienced in the Western Hemisphere.

They both have resulted in large loss of life and immense human suffering and make the coordination of emergency resources extremely difficult. Ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves in the wreckage. And as we saw in Katrina and see now in Haiti, residents of disaster-stricken areas are the true first responders.

The aftermath of such catastrophes brings more prolonged suffering and massive recovery challenges. People pay attention as the media cover them, but they turn their attention elsewhere when the cameras leave, even though many of the real challenges that victims and affected regions face emerge later. Like the Gulf region, Haiti will struggle for years and perhaps decades to rebuild and recover.

But there, the comparisons end.

The contrasts have much to do with the events’ impacts on a national versus regional scale.

Katrina did not flatten our nation’s capital or prevent national leaders from communicating with one another. Impacts were catastrophic in areas where Katrina struck, creating significant logistics problems, but the infrastructure of the rest of the nation was untouched. Also important, it was possible to issue warnings for Katrina, which enabled the vast majority of those who were at risk to evacuate to safety. The victims of the earthquake had no such warning.

In contrast, the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of its capital, Port-au-Prince, and affected approximately one-third of the population of the entire country. The proportion of the nation’s population that has been killed, injured or left homeless is enormous. The facilities that could have assisted victims, such as hospitals, clinics and the UN headquarters for the nation, were destroyed or are not operational. Aftershocks, which will continue for weeks, months and perhaps even years, will do additional damage and further compound both rescue and relief efforts.

In addition, both disasters affected the poor and vulnerable, but again scale comes into play:

On almost all indicators of well-being — health, education, literacy, income — Haiti ranks very low. The nation has a long history of rule by dictators, political coups and savage violence. The capacity of Haiti’s series of governments to provide services to its people has been abysmal for most of its history.

In many ways, residents of Haiti faced a daily disaster even before the earthquake. These differences matter, and they should be kept in mind by those seeking to see parallels between the two catastrophes.

The Bakersfield Californian welcomes 2010 by reflecting on the past decade:

Naming this decade — and we must, because we are Americans, and we name things — isn’t going be so easy. Some decades, at least in retrospect, are easy calls. The Gay Nineties. The Roaring Twenties. The Psychedelic Sixties. But naming the ’00s is a challenge best postponed, because nothing we’ve considered rings with authenticity.

So,

All we can do is look at the evidence that historians and sociologists not yet born will consider. And one thing, beyond the bookend disasters of 9/11 and the Great Recession, stands out: Technology reshaped who we are and how we interact. Social media took hold of America in the last few years of the ’00s, with 350 million users on Facebook, 100 million on MySpace, and 18 million using Twitter.

Sociologist Rhonda Dugan weighs in:

“I’d call it the Decade of Self-Importance,” she said. “Everyone is networking online, but they’re not doing it just to find jobs. They’re doing it to talk about themselves. The ‘Me Decade’ was all about me. Now it’s about me and telling everyone about it. I use Facebook myself. And now I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I posting that I ran a half-marathon?’ We’ve become more narcissistic, and social media has helped push it along.”

Retired sociologist Russell Travis also comments:

“I’d call it the PTSD — the Post-Traumatic Stress Decade,” he said. That name “reflects the cumulative stress from the aftermath of two ongoing wars and the many coming home afflicted with (real) PTSD; the aftermath of a seriously tanked economy; … and the aftermath of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.”

Maybe this is how we’ve come to deal with events just too big and too profound to process — by blocking out the wider world and turning inward, going to our own, personal safe place where the mundane trumps the abstract, the ordinary blocks out the incomprehensible, and 140 characters (or less) just about covers it.