A history of violence

Figure 1.2 Hurricane Katrina

most coastal populations living there in 2004, the experience of responding to a tsunami had long faded from living memory.

Eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunamis, a very different history of violence unfolded on the other side of the world. On 29 August 2005, Hur-ricane Katrina (Figure 1.2) hit coastal areas of the States of Louisiana and Mississippi in the Unit-ed States of America, killing 1,833 people and causing an estimated US$125 billion in econom-ic damage.⁴

Katrina was a large, strong but not exception-al Category 3 hurricane when it made landfexception-all.

In fact, Hurricanes Andrew and Charley, which impacted Florida in 1992 and 2004, respective-ly, and Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi in 1969, involved higher wind speeds and, in the case of the Florida storms, lower central pressure than Katrina (NOAA, 2005). Moreover, unlike the Indian Ocean tsunamis, Katrina could hardly be

considered unexpected. Hurricane early warn-ing systems have existed in the Atlantic Basin since the nineteenth century. Katrina occurred in the middle of the Atlantic hurricane season and made landfall in a region with a history of recur-rent hurricane activity.

Similarly, the cascading disaster that unfolded in New Orleans, where the levees that protected the city from flooding were breached and utilities and the transport network collapsed, should not have come as a surprise. Much of the city of New Orleans lay below sea level and was considered a disaster risk hotspot. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had already devel-oped scenarios that modelled the consequenc-es if the leveconsequenc-es that protected the city were to fail.

On August 26^th, three days before Katrina made landfall, warnings were issued and the Gover-nors of Louisiana and Mississippi declared states of emergency (Moynihan, 2009). However, the city, state and federal authorities failed to evac-uate in a timely fashion around 100,000 out of a total population of approximately 1.3 million (Tierney, 2008).

When the Mayor of New Orleans finally gave the evacuation order on the morning of August 28^th, twenty-four hours before the hurricane made landfall, a significant share of the largely low-income population that inhabited flood-exposed areas of New Orleans did not have access to any means to evacuate. The contingency plans for the city assumed evacuation by automobile. No plans had been made for those without cars, including the elderly and disabled, or without the resourc-es to procure transport and hotel rooms.

There are many reasons why the federal, state and city authorities, faced with a predictable hazard event and identified risks, failed to respond effec-tively and why so many people were left behind.

FEMA had been weakened as priority shifted from physical hazards like hurricanes to other threats

in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Emergency management organizations at all levels were reportedly under-staffed and under-resourced. But over and above institutional weaknesses and administrative fail-ures, the disaster unveiled a history of inequality that configured the city’s vulnerability to the hur-ricane as well as the authorities’ response to it.

In some ways, that history seems to have contin-ued unchanged in the recovery of New Orleans, reproducing and rebuilding new vulnerabilities (Box 1.1).

Superficially, the disasters associated with the Indian Ocean tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina appear to be different moments in a common history of violent and destructive disasters: rep-resentations of overwhelming natural events causing massive death and destruction. But beneath the surface, the two disasters have very different narratives.

In many ways the Indian Ocean disasters were a representation of dis-astrum (Latin for “bad star”), the impact of an infrequent and unexpected nat-ural event of extraordinary magnitude outside of human agency. In Timaeus, Plato commented:

“There have been many and diverse destructions of mankind. We know this because we possess the records of those who witnessed the events and

survived. Now the stories as they are told have the fashion of a legend, but the truth of them lies in the shifting of the bodies in the heavens that recurs at long intervals.”

In the case of such extreme hazards, the degree of disaster risk is conditioned more by expo-sure than by vulnerability. In other words, all those exposed to the tsunamis were at risk, irrespective of their income, ethnicity or social class (UNISDR, 2011a). The only possible disas-ter risk management strategies would have been to reduce exposure through timely evacuation, which in turn would have depended on the exis-tence of reliable early warning systems and effec-tive preparedness planning grounded in the exposed communities, and then to compensate for loss through insurance or other risk financing instruments.

In contrast, the disaster in New Orleans repre-sented a predictable and tragic kata-strophe (Greek for “down-turn”), the tragic finish to a long drama. While Hurricane Katrina was an intense hurricane, it was the historically configured risk in New Orleans, the vulnerability of those left behind and the lack of effective actions to assist them that conditioned the scale of the disaster.

Box 1.1 Rebuilding social vulnerability in New Orleans

The failure of flood protection infrastructure, a failure to anticipate the disaster and a badly managed response exacerbated and magnified the pre-existing conditions of social vulnerability and inequality in New Orleans (Levitt and Whitaker, 2009; Tierney, 2006; Amnesty International, 2010; Masozera et al., 2007).

Subsequent to Hurricane Katrina, the reconstruction process, and within it the construction sector, have been key drivers in the reproduction of inequality and social vulnerability (Jenkins et al., 2012). In 2011, six years after the disaster, the average wage in New Orleans was 6 per cent lower than the US average and pov-erty stood at 29 per cent, almost double the US average of 15.9 per cent. Recent data shows that New Orleans ranks second among all major US cities in terms of inequality.⁶ Between 1999 and 2011, median household income fell by 9 per cent, while income inequality had risen by up to 50 per cent (Bishaw, 2012;

GNOCDC, 2013).

In the case of Category 3 hurricanes affecting similar numbers of exposed people, about 46 per cent of the variance in mortality risk is explained by vulnerability (UNISDR, 2011a). This means that if effective actions are taken to address social and economic vulnerability and to strengthen resil-ience, disaster risk can be significantly reduced.

Disasters such as the one that unfolded in New Orleans in 2005 cannot be blamed on extreme natural events or on “bad stars”, but rather on the lack of a political and economic imperative to reduce risks.

Disaster risk is normally considered a function of the severity and frequency of the hazard, of the numbers of people and assets exposed to the hazard, and of their vulnerability or susceptibili-ty to damage. From that perspective, dis-astrum and kata-strophe are not opposing or mutually exclusive disaster types, but rather different lay-ers of risk.

The most intensive risk layers, which are charac-terized by very low-frequency but high-severity losses and are normally associated with extreme hazard events such as the Indian Ocean tsunamis, manifest as dis-astrum. The more extensive risk layers, which are characterized by high-frequen-cy but low-severity losses and are associated with localized and recurrent hazard events such as flash floods, landslides and storms, manifest as kata-strophe. In the more intensive risk layers, it is the hazard and exposure that dominate the risk equation, while in the more extensive layers vul-nerability plays a larger part.

The risk profile of most countries includes a range of risk layers. However, in most contexts, disas-ter risk reduction has been approached through an interpretation of disaster as dis-astrum, as a set of practices to protect development against exogenous threats rather than to prevent or avoid the generation and accumulation of risks within development. This interpretation has influenced and permeated the practice of disaster risk man-agement and its effectiveness in achieving the policy objective of disaster risk reduction.

Figure 1.3 The Hyogo Framework for Action

1.2

On 17 January 1995, the Great Hanshin earth-quake devastated the port of Kobe, Japan (UNIS-DR, 2013a). Ten years after the quake, some 23 days after the impact of the Indian Ocean tsuna-mis and 223 days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, 168 UN Member States gathered in Kobe to adopt a new international framework for disaster reduction, better known as the Hyogo Framework for Action: 2005-2015, or HFA.

Under the slogan Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, the HFA was struc-tured around an expected outcome, three strate-gic goals and five priorities for action (Figure 1.3).

The World Conference in Kobe was planned long before the Indian Ocean tsunamis, and the HFA was not the first international agreement to address disaster risks. Since 1979, a number of international agreements and policy frame-works have evolved to guide global and national efforts in disaster risk reduction (Box 1.2). How-ever, the magnitude of the disasters in the Indian Ocean and the consequent global humanitarian response galvanized a level of political interest in the HFA that might not have arisen otherwise.

These 25 years of international agreements indi-cate a growing, albeit sometimes symbolic, polit-ical commitment by UN Member States to the policy goal of disaster risk reduction (Olson et al., 2011). However, 25 years after the declaration of the IDNDR, 20 years after the Yokohama Strate-gy, 15 years after the launch of the ISDR and 10 years after the endorsement of the HFA, evidence of continued disaster risk and loss still questions the extent to which the expected outcome of the HFA, “The substantial reduction of disaster losses,

Box 1.2 International agreements to address disaster risks

As early as 1979, an expert group convened by the Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (UNDRO) concluded that “it is now also realized that the actual and potential consequences of natural haz-ards are becoming so serious and so increasingly global in scale, that much greater emphasis will henceforth have to be given to pre-disaster planning and prevention” (UNDRO, 1980).

Nearly a decade later, the UN General Assembly designated the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and defined five specific goals, including “to disseminate existing and new informa-tion related to measures for the assessment, predicinforma-tion, preveninforma-tion and mitigainforma-tion of natural disasters” and to develop programmes of “technical assistance and technology transfer, demonstration projects and education and training, tailored to specific hazards and locations, and to evaluate the effectiveness of those programmes”.

In 1991, the General Assembly noted that approximately 100 States had established national strategies to achieve the objectives of the IDNDR and endorsed a World Conference, which took place in Yokohama, Japan in June 1994. The resulting Yokohama Strategy for a Safer World emphasized the importance of disaster prevention, mitigation and preparedness, highlighting that response alone was not sufficient.

The shift in emphasis from disaster response to disaster risk reduction was taken further in the Interna-tional Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), which was launched in 1999 to follow up on the IDNDR and to develop the Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action. In addition, in 2002 the Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development declared: “an integrated, multi-hazard, inclusive approach to address vulnerability, risk assessment and disaster management, including prevention, mitigation, pre-paredness, response and recovery, is an essential element of a safer world in the twenty-first century”.

Figure 1.4 From disaster response to disaster risk reduction

(Source: adapted from UNISDR Virtual Library.)

(Source: International Law Commission, 2013.)

In 2004 the UN General Assembly convened the second World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, held in Kobe in 2005, to build on the Yokohama Strategy and the Johannesburg Plan of Action. The resulting Hyogo Declaration emphasized the reduction of vulnerabilities and the strengthening of resilience of nations and communities “in the context of the disaster reduction cycle, which consists of prevention, preparedness, and emergency response, as well as recovery and reconstruction”.

1.3

A national system is born

On 13 November 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz Vol-cano in Colombia erupted. Although the govern-ment had received multiple warnings of volcanic in lives and in the social and economic assets of

communities and countries”, has really been achieved and therefore whether the way disas-ter risk reduction has been understood and prac-tised by most countries is really fit for purpose.

manage disaster risk (Government of Colombia, 1988; World Bank, 2012) and were symbolic of the emergence of a dedicated disaster risk manage-ment sector; this paradigm shift was consecrated with the adoption of the HFA in 2005.

Emergency management

The origins of what is now a disaster risk man-agement sector in most countries can be found in the institutions, legislation and policies, adminis-trative arrangements and instrumental systems created to respond to and manage disasters and crises. The concept of civil defence emerged fol-lowing the bombing of civilian areas in the First World War, and in 1935 a Civil Defence Service was established by the Home Office of the United Kingdom. Likewise, the Office of Civilian Defense was created in the United States of America in 1941.⁷

After the Second World War, the focus of civ-il defence, particularly in Europe, shifted to the goal of protecting the population against nucle-ar destruction. But when the Cold Wnucle-ar came to an end, the focus shifted again towards pro-tecting the population against hazards such as floods, earthquakes and storms, and in the 2000s towards protection against terrorist attacks.

These successive changes in focus can be observed in the United States of America, where in 1979 the different civil defence agencies were brought together in the Federal Emergency Man-agement Agency (FEMA), which was assimilated into the Department of Homeland Security fol-lowing the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

Massive disasters associated with droughts and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, with floods, cyclones and conflict in Bangladesh, and with earthquakes, for example in Peru in 1970, Nica-ragua in 1972 and Guatemala in 1976, generated activity from scientific organizations since

Sep-tember of that year and hazard maps had been prepared, the local population was warned but not evacuated. In the town of Armero, around 20,000 out of a total population of 29,000 were killed, as were a further 1,500 in nearby Chinchiná.

Just one week earlier, 100 hostages—including 11 judges—had died when the Colombian armed forces ended a siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogota by the M-19 guerrilla group (Procuradu-ría General de la Nación, 2005). The government was widely held responsible for the loss of life in both events. In the case of the volcanic disaster, the government was faulted for multiple failures in risk identification, early warning, prepared-ness, evacuation and response (Zeiderman and Ramirez Elizalde, 2010).

Four years later, in 1989, the National System for Disaster Prevention and Response was creat-ed in an ambitious reform of disaster risk man-agement (Government of Colombia, 1988). The national system embraced better disaster man-agement and incorporated the country’s origi-nal civil defence organization at the time. But it also adopted disaster risk reduction as a policy goal and gave explicit priority to a much broad-er range of disastbroad-er risk management practices.

Moreover, it introduced an innovative systems approach to risk governance which was inte-grated horizontally across government minis-tries and departments, vertically across regional, departmental and local governments, and with specified roles for scientific and technical institu-tions, the Red Cross and other non-governmen-tal organizations.

The concurrent creation of the Colombian national system and the declaration of the IDNDR marked a paradigm shift in the gover-nance arrangements that countries adopt to

a perceived need for stronger international coor-dination of response and relief efforts (Hannigan, 2012; FAO, 2010; Bamidele, 2011; CEPAL, 1973;

CEPAL, 1976; European Commission and Comu-nidad Andina, 2006). This was supported by the creation of the United Nations Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO) in 1971 to coordinate interna-tional efforts to respond to disaster and conflict (Hannigan, 2012).

The governance arrangements developed for emergency management displayed a number of characteristics that would later influence the way disaster risk management has been approached.

These arrangements were adopted to protect societies against what were conceived as exter-nal threats to civilians and to natioexter-nal securi-ty. Disasters were perceived as one such threat, along with technological, maritime and aviation accidents and the effects of conflict. Disasters were regarded as unpredictable, extreme events, which is aptly illustrated by an early 1990s slo-gan from the Pan American Health Orslo-ganization:

“Disasters don’t warn; be prepared”.

An effective response to such external threats required increasingly sophisticated, profession-alized and technically speciprofession-alized institutions and mechanisms at all levels, leading to the structur-ing of a distinct sector with its own doctrine, dog-ma, and distinctive signs and symbols. In some countries, civil defence and protection organi-zations were military structures, while in others they were located in the interior or home min-istry, which is also responsible for law enforce-ment, emergency services and domestic security.

The sector and the institutions it comprises have demonstrated a remarkable institutional resil-ience and capacity to adapt to changing cir-cumstances and needs, as the series of shifts from warfare to nuclear threat, to disaster and to terrorism have shown. This highlights a con-solidated sector that defends not only national

security but also its own interests and agenda and expresses this in its distinctive community identity and branding.

Standards and regulation

In parallel with the evolution of emergency man-agement, countries adopted other kinds of gov-ernance arrangements to manage disaster risk, including statutory norms and standards in areas such as public health, environment, planning and building.

Societies have always adapted their build-ing, agricultural and other practices to manage disaster risks within a range of environmental, technological, social, economic and political constraints.

In the wake of large disasters, it was common for building practices or urban design to be modified with a view to reducing risk. For example, follow-ing the 1746 earthquake in Lima, Peru, Viceroy Jose Antonio Manso de Velasco commissioned French mathematician Louis Godin to develop a reconstruction plan for the city. While never ful-ly implemented, Godin’s plan included detailed specifications for widened streets and reduced building height to avoid future earthquake dam-age (UNISDR, 2011a), an early example of recon-struction planning which integrates risk-sensitive planning and building codes.

From the nineteenth century onwards, industrial-ized countries has begun to codify risk-reducing practices into statutory regulations and stan-dards on a scientific basis. For example, during the 1854 epidemic in London, Dr. John Snow used a geographical analysis of cholera cases to trace

From the nineteenth century onwards, industrial-ized countries has begun to codify risk-reducing practices into statutory regulations and stan-dards on a scientific basis. For example, during the 1854 epidemic in London, Dr. John Snow used a geographical analysis of cholera cases to trace