Why is disaster-planning such a disaster? We often find that we were woefully unprepared for major natural and human-made disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, the Texas power outage, the Northridge earthquake, California wildfires and even 9/11. Although officials dismiss these as unpredictable, one-off events, that’s usually not the case. Examine the factors that lead to unpreparedness—from a political unwillingness to spend money for appropriate mitigation measures to a human inability to fully comprehend the nature of risk. Other factors include a lack of imagination on the part of planners, the pernicious tendency of disasters to have cascading and compounding effects, and the impact of global climate change. At the end of the class, we will consider a way forward from this apparently eternal problem.
