25th Hazards Research and Applications Workshop
Boulder, CO, 9-12 July 2000
This paper presents two case studies. One is about a technological risk controversy: the use of plutonium dioxide radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) on board the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, in light of its gravity-assist swing by Earth in August 1999. The other is about a natural hazard controversy: the Anaheim Hills landslide of January 1993, which destroyed 32 luxury homes that had been built on the site with full knowledge of its ancient and modern landslide history. In both cases, attention is paid to the use of the Internet by parties to the controversies to generate awareness and to stimulate political activism out of that awareness.
For the Cassini case study, the data consist of Internet dialogues on the topic, specifically, UseNet postings from 1 April 1995 through 31 March 1999. They illustrate the exponential impact of a very small and well-organized opposition movement, which utilized the Internet to exert pressure to abort the launch and flyby. Though Cassini went on to Saturn, the resulting political pressure on NASA has created an atmosphere of public controversy in which new missions may be more difficult to authorize if their goals and design require RTGs.
For the Anaheim Hills case study, the data derive from a content analysis of a massive web site built by one of the victims of the landslide, building a forum for other victims to relate their individual stories, an activist bulletin board for victims seeking restitution and, increasingly, for potential victims in a growing series of other landslide-susceptible locations, and a site to warn potential buyers away from hazardous areas.
The successes of the anti-Cassini activists on the one hand and the victim of the landslide on the other raise questions about the nature of hazard decision-making in a democratic but unevenly informed society and about the sources of uneven access to information. It underscores the empowerment of small but well-organized groups in the realm of natural and technological hazard policy and the potential of the Internet in heightening individual empowerment in such debates. It also raises less heartening issues of potential demagoguery in cyberspace.
A lot of my research on hazards over the last seven years has focussed on the role of media in the social construction of a given hazard. That is, how do the media portray a given hazard or disaster and how does that portrayal affect individual perceptions and agency reactions to a given situation or event? The first disaster in which I explored this was the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Briefly, my colleagues, Eugenie Rovai and Susan Place, and I found that the geography of print media attention markedly differed from the actual geography of red-tagged and yellow-tagged buildings. Grossly overcovered communities were 61 percent non-Hispanic white and had per capita incomes of $26,000; grossly undercovered communities were only 22 percent non-Hispanic white and had per capita incomes of only $14,000. Mental maps of the disaster were elicited from a random sample of people in the region, and they accorded nearly perfectly with the media geography rather than with the actual pattern of damage. Most disturbingly, areas that were disproportionately overcovered were recovering at a rate significantly higher than the areas that were disproporionately undercovered. Media skew, then, has serious ramifications for people's understanding of and perceptions of a hazard situation or disastrous event and for the equity of response, recovery, and reconstruction.
My next project took this interest in media and hazard into the arena of technological risks because of the volume of e-mail messages on the subject I began receiving in summer and fall of 1997 through my subscriptions to various listservers. I became interested in the controversy that erupted around the plutonium carried aboard the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, particularly as both sides of that controversy were found in my circle of friends. This project widened my interest in media from the audience-passive traditional print, television, and radio media to the uses of the much more interactive Internet in the controversy. At the present time, I am beginning to explore these more interactive media channels in controversies over natural hazards, too, initially a battle over landslides in Anaheim Hills, California.
In this paper, I will focus on the Cassini controversy and introduce the Anaheim Hills one. For each, I'll present a brief background on the risk assessment and risk management policy issues brought up in the debate and then analyze the uses of the Internet in the controversies. For the Cassini case, I'll concentrate on UseNet and for Anaheim Hills, the web. I'll then wrap up with the dilemma facing politicians with risk management responsibilities when Internet activism generates large scale constituent queries and protests. Is there some way those of us in the hazards community can apply the lessons of Cassini and Anaheim to create pressure for disaster-resilient communities?
The first case study is the Cassini-Huygens mission. Launched in October of 1997, the Cassini orbiter will spend four years on tour in the Saturn system beginning in 2004 and drop the European Huygens probe onto its largest moon, Titan. This is physically the largest and scientifically the most ambitious mission ever undertaken by NASA or its European partners.
Background to the Cassini Controversy
The controversy around the mission erupted as a result of NASA's decision to utilize radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and thermal units (RHUs) to generate electrical power for the instruments and to keep them at operating temperature in the deep cold 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun. RTGs and RHUs contain ceramicized plutonium-238 dioxide.
Besides the launch of ceramic balls containing plutonium, another, related point of controversy was the trajectory getting Cassini from Earth to Saturn. The spacecraft is so immense that no launch vehicle could impart the velocity required for a direct shot to Saturn. So, over its seven year cruise to Saturn, the spacecraft picks up speed through gravitational slingshots by various planets, one of which was Earth. Many people became concerned that the RTGs and RHUs could possibly explode or pulverize in the event of a flyby accident and give a lot of people a carcinogenic dose of plutonium as the dust circulated through the planet's atmosphere.
NASA had had an environmental impact analysis performed for it by a variety of outside agencies and researchers. These had reported extremely small probabilities for cancer deaths from plutonium releases during launch or swingby (ranging from 0.04 deaths from a late launch accident to 120 deaths developing over decades in the event of a swingby accident). Anti-Cassini activists were skeptical of any risk assessment performed for NASA and came up with their own figures, ranging from over 200,000 to 20,000,000. The opponents further claimed that NASA was imposing an unnecessary risk, because they argue that solar power would have been an option, even out at Saturn, where insolation is 1 percent that at Earth.
By 1995, a movement began to abort the October 1997 launch of Cassini. The launch went forward, so the movement then focussed on aborting the flyby. The movement was unsuccessful in stopping either of these events, but it did generate an enormous amount of controversy and a lot of pressure on Congress, which led to several senators and representatives signing a public petition against the mission. The movement may not have achieved its original goals, but it did succeed in making RTG and RHU use controversial, which may affect the design, authorization, and funding of future missions.
UseNet Activism over Cassini
I became interested in how the Internet was being used to build both opposition to Cassini and support for Cassini. Besides a number of print media and television pieces on the controversy, most of the day-to-day activism took place on e-mail and listservers, the web, and on UseNet. I was interested in the immediacy of communications among individuals enabled by the Internet, so I was more interested in e-mail and UseNet. UseNet became my focus, because all UseNet discussions have been archived by Déja.com since the beginning of the controversy, back in 1995.
Hypotheses
I decided to go through these postings to evaluate several hypotheses that follow from hazards literature in general and technological risk literature in particular. Based on this literature, I expected UseNet commentary to focus on perceived control over the hazard exposure, because people often will tolerate high levels of risk if they are the ones making the choice but will become very upset over vanishingly small risks if they feel the exposure is being imposed on them. I also expected discussion of fairness, of equity, in the allocation of the mission's costs and benefits. A central expectation was that dread would dominate the discussion because of the nuclear issues involved. Another theme I expected was mistrust of public institutions in protecting the public. I also expected different takes on the issue among different demographic segments of the population. Lastly, I expected opponents to dominate discussion, because their motivations (particularly dread) are emotionally more compelling than the motives of mission proponents (the romance of space exploration and curiosity about Saturn and Titan).
Data and Methods
Using Déja.com's search engine, I searched through the population of 19,853 messages posted on "Cassini" from April 1995 through March 1999. I sampled the discussion by going through the top 250 messages month by month. This yielded comments by 937 authors who had, among them, posted 8,020 messages. The authors were classified by stance (based on their most recent postings), central concerns they raised, gender, and whether their message were original composition or simply forwards from someone else.
Findings
I was rather surprised to learn that the great majority of authors were supportive of the mission: 60 percent were supporters; 21 percent were opponents; and 20 percent were neutral.
The only demographic difference I could pick out among the authors was gender. This debate was overwhelmingly a male preserve: Fewer than 5 percent of authors were female and they contributed only 3 percent of the posts. Both genders were likelier to support Cassini than to oppose it, but there is a gender-gap. Only 45 percent of the women were mission-supporters, versus 63% of the men; 38 percent of the women were opponents, while only 18 percent of the men were. Had the genders been equally represented among the authors, the proponents would still have been in the majority, but the disparity would not have been so extreme.
I examined the specific concerns of authors in all three positions to understand what activated them to contribute to the social debate over Cassini. Opponents were dominated by three subtypes: (1) 24 percent simply passed on messages originating from about half a dozen people or organizations, often without comment; (2) another 24 percent wrote independent expressions of concern about the risks of plutonium in general or during the launch and flyby phases of this mission in particular; and (3) 21 percent were people interested in Nostradamus and astrology, who expressed great fear that Cassini was the "King of Terror" that Nostradamus had predicted would come from the skies and destroy Earth in summer of 1999 (the Earth flyby took place in August 1999).
Proponents, given their much larger numbers, discussed a wider range of issues and concerns, with no one issue commanding as many as a fifth of the authors. The most common statement (17 percent) was that the opposition was very small if very vocal and unqualified to comment. Sixteen percent opined that the risk of the mission or of RTGs was being grossly overstated. Thirteen percent simply enthused about the mission and its goals. Another 10 percent engaged in rather nasty "flaming" of the opponents. Only 6 percent forwarded on other people's or organizations' messages, usually something from the JPL publicity office.
Contrary to the expectations of hazards literature, there was no concern expressed over the issue of control over the plutonium exposure, not even among the opponents. Fairness questions are often raised as an explanation for public activism over technological risk, but only 2 percent of authors raised the issue of fairness and that in a manner tangential to the risk of plutonium exposure. Most of these complained about how NASA's monopoly over the space enterprise was unfair to the private sector. There was also a minor gender gap, which has occasionally emerged in other hazards perception studies. The gap is statistically significant with a Chi-square prob-value of 0.005 but extremely weak with a Cramér's V of 0.117.
Perfectly in accordance with prior literature, however, dread is the central axis in this hazards debate. Two thirds of opponents expressed dread of nuclear contamination and the Nostradamus discussants were terrified that Cassini would bring about the predicted end of the world. Over a quarter of the proponents addressed the dread factor, too, mainly by trivializing the probability of an accident and the consequences of an accident should one occur.
Another factor mentioned in hazards literature is mistrust of public institutions, and it shows up in this debate. Six opponents say that there is a NASA conspiracy to militarize space and the plutonium on Cassini is the camel's nose in the tent, and another 7 stated that the media were censoring the plutonium risks of Cassini. Both of these arguments are often cited in the 46 messages forwarded by opponents. Even a few proponents (9) said they thought the media were biased towards the opponents and were not letting NASA have a chance to defend the mission and its goals. So, mistrust of government and of media is common in this debate and, in the case of the media, is shared by both sides.
Discussion
The Cassini controversy demonstrates the empowerment the Internet offers to political activists. A handful of people can alert others to gravely concerning issues and enlist them to spread the news. The population notified of the issue expands exponentially and, even if a small number of those exposed to the idea responds politically, the result can be tremendous political pressure. Potentially very empowering to ordinary citizens, the Internet offers a counterweight to the political power of great corporations and wealthy individuals.
This kind of Internet activism reflects some of the work done by John-Paul Mulilis and Shelley Duval on person-relative-to-event approaches in hazard perception and reaction. Their model is built on the relationship between perceived magnitude of threatening events and perceived resources to do something about them. The originating half dozen or so activists often stress the dire consequences of exposure to plutonium and claim that the danger of exposure from Cassini is drastically greater than NASA admits, messages that constitute negative threat appeals in the field of social psychology. The Internet makes activism through the forward button so easy that it raises readers' appraisal of their resources for coping with the threat. The predicted outcome of this conjunction of high magnitude negative threat appeals and high coping resources is a high level of the problem-focussed coping behavior represented by Internet activism.
The demagogic use of the Internet, however, remains the shadow of empowerment. Appeals to conspiracies, ad hominem attacks, exaggeration, and other emotionally-manipulative devices are the hallmark of demagoguery, and they are abundant in this debate, particularly among the opponents but also among flame-prone proponents. The complex nature of Cassini and of many other both technological and natural hazard controversies makes it inaccessible to the average citizen, who yet must decide whether to act politically about this or similar situations or, worse, for a democratic society, remain uninformed and apathetic. This is a dilemma we all face as citizens: We have to make judgments, and there is no way any of us can spend the time to look into issues far from our training.
So, we have shortcuts to opinions -- we tend to defer to the opinions of people and organizations we trust, our reference groups. The problem with this is that it is possible that a handful of people could hijack this mechanism of trust and, through the ease and exponential expansion of activism-by-the-forward button, mobilize a lot of us into a politically potent movement, deflecting our energies from other causes that would normally attract our attention. In this case, attention to a relatively trivial hazard may result in inattention to a more significant hazard well within our powers to do something about.
Risk management decision-makers, particularly politicians, would be well-reminded that they may be hearing from an unrepresentative selection of their voting and contributing constituents in technological risk debates, as in many other issues. This sample may be responding to demagoguery, self-interest, or the rational consideration of risks and benefits: The source of political pressure may not be too apparent when decision-makers consider policy to manage a hazard. While one would hope they rely on risk assessment science in framing their responses, they must do so in an atmosphere of political risk and uncertainty, with its own Type I and Type II hazards to their own careers!
The second case study, one I'm just beginning to analyze, involves the use of the web by one deeply angry victim of a landslide in the Anaheim Hills area of Orange County, one of the suburbs to the southeast of Los Angeles proper. This individual took to the Internet after the slump occurred, so the character of his activism is ex-post facto, unlike the anti-Cassini activists' work. Rather than a single focus on stopping a specific event perceived as hazardous, this site has several foci. The author, Gerald Steiner, wishes to expose the prior knowledge of landslide hazard on the part of elected city government officials and, therefore, their culpability in what he characterizes as failure to disclose. He seeks to educate others on the nature of landslide hazards in the region and provide them with one stop access to USGS, FEMA, and California Division of Mines and Geology information and maps they can peruse before making offers on homes in Orange County. Another purpose is to provide a forum for other victims of the slides to share their stories and to stay abreast of current developments in their legal actions against the City of Anaheim.
Background to the Anaheim Hills Controversy
This case involves the slump of a 25 acre hillslope on the 16th and 17th of January 1993 in a neighborhood of luxury homes on view sites in the Anaheim Hills. This development was built in 1973 on known ancient landslides that had experienced some sliding in the early 1960s. A few dozen families were evacuated and more than 200 are affected by other symptoms of ground slippage, so 280 households sued the City of Anaheim. The legal firm they engaged had won a similar suit elsewhere in Southern California, and the residents expected to be made whole for the loss of their homes or the costs of structural repairs and mitigations. The situation exposed a loophole in real-estate disclosure laws in California, which allows sellers and realtors not to disclose areas of significant landslide hazard, if they have been mitigated.
The mitigation chosen by the City here entailed dewatering wells, which, obviously, did not work. Rather than pay the claims and perform structural mitigations, the City chose to spend nearly 9 million dollars in legal fees, claiming that the residents helped create the slide by overwatering their lawns and because of leaky backyard swimming pools. The legal firm representing the homeowners worked out a settlement yielding approximately $7,000 per homeowner and forcing them into a Geological Hazard Abatement District to self-fund the maintenance of 150 pumps and wells, which is estimated to require $5,000 per year per household after the City's initial donation of $3.5 million runs out in a few years. Some homeowners sued their attorneys for failure of fiduciary responsibility. In this morass of conflicting claims and accusations and lawsuits, Gerald Steiner, one of the affected homeowners, built an absolutely amazing website: http://anaheim-landslide.com
Anaheim Hills Victim Activism on the Web
This website contains a couple hundred pages and links. Some of these are the author's, Gerald Steiner's, sarcastic commentaries on the process and the politicians and lawyers involved. Others are maps from the USGS or California Department of Conservation Division of Mines and Geology, showing hazard-prone areas. Still others are geological reports and environmental impact statements and local news reports. There are timelines of the history of Anaheim Hills and its landslides, copies of the legal actions and depositions, myriad photographs of the damages, videos of politicians and lawyers making contradictory statements, a couple dozen letters Steiner has received from other victims of the disaster, documenting their suffering and their support for his efforts, and queries from people wanting to know if they should buy thus-and-such a home in the area. Much attention is devoted to caveat emptor, since realtors and sellers apparently do not have to divulge the slide hazard classification, given the dewatering wells and pumps.
Steiner's Purpose
Steiner has said that his site helps level the public-opinion playing field between the neighbors and the city, with its team of top attorneys. As he puts it, "I think in future, political action will be a basic part of the Internet." The City has tried to close down the web site, saying that the site is full of misinformation. The site is obviously one-sided, but it also brings together a tremendous amount of landslide and earthquake hazard information and maps that would normally never occur to a home buyer to ask about, especially if the slide information is not required to be in the hazards disclosure statement. As such, it is extremely informative, the more so since its controversial character makes the site popular and entertaining. It casts light on a loophole in the disclosure process that contributes to a faulty hazard perception on the part of residents and potential residents. It also yields an informative if jaundiced perspective on the dialogue between geological risk assessment and the very political process of risk management decision-making in local governmental bodies, a process that exposed a lot of people unawares to a potentially lethal and financially devastating hazard.
Discussion
As with the UseNet discussions of Cassini, this one-person web campaign stirs up a good deal of anti-government sentiment and draws on popular suspicion of government and risk management planners. It, too, draws on dread, in this case the horror of waking up in the middle of the night hearing your home creaking and having the local police forcibly evict you from your disintegrating home. Steiner details the impacts of these events on his neighbors and himself -- divorces, medical interventions for suicidal actions, bankruptcies, drug problems -- with a "this could be you if you buy in the hills of Orange County" tone.
Unlike the Cassini debate, this site is all about fairness and control. Steiner feels that local government and realtors do not disclose enough information for potential homebuyers to know the risk they're assuming moving into the hillsides of Southern California. Without the disclosure necessary for informed consent in risk assumption, Steiner feels that homeowners have needlessly lost control over their risk exposure. This is bound up with fairness and equity issues, in that the City's actions and the settlement imposed on the affected homeowners in Steiner's view leaves them holding a bag they never knew was being handed to them.
There is an interesting fairness and equity dimension to this controversy that is quite hidden from Mr. Steiner. These people are like hazards victims everywhere in the degree and poignancy of their individual sufferings. Unlike victims of, say, mudslides in Central America or Appalachia, however, they have been able to publicize their own stories through the access of one of their own to web authoring skills and domain-hosting resources. The appalling losses of these at least originally very prosperous households are out there, courtesy of the middle and upper strata's command of financial and educational resources. Others like them with access to the Internet can learn from their tragedies and begin to insulate themselves from the potential devastation of landslide hazards in the view lots of Southern California. Other victims suffer silently, uninformed of their risk exposure, stricken by disaster, unable to get their own stories out, and overlooked by society -- Chomsky's "unworthy" victims.
So far, this tacit fairness issue affects all social organizing on the Internet. The Cassini activists, too, are middle and professional class people (professors of journalism and of physics, physicians, and the owner of a software company). At this point in time, interactive civic action offers tremendous empowerment to individuals already to some extent privileged in this society -- cybersegregation still divides those with access to this medium and those without, those comfortable with it and those still uncomfortable. The potential of democratic oversight of risk assessment and risk management awaits the effective arrival of the poor, of minorities, of working class people, and, at least in the case of Cassini, of women. The empowerment of these now marginal voices in these dialogues can only make interactive media a fascinating channel for the hazards community to watch.
In the meanwhile, we might want to learn from Mr. Steiner and his do-it-yourself hazards education program and from the various participants in the Cassini controversy. Can disaster assistance agencies begin to exploit the exponential expansion of electronic audiences through the compounding of the forward button to get our own messages of risk assessment and risk mitigation out there?