Adjustment to Hazards

So, you have a hazard -- and you actually perceive it and cognize its importance (which, as we've seen previously, is a surprisingly high hurdle to clear). What do you do about it as an individual? How does human society cope with it?

How society or an individual or household copes with hazard is called "adjustment to hazard."

Ideally, loss reduction through mitigation and preparation should be prominent in social and individual adjustment to hazard, because they are less costly than disaster response, restoration, and reconstruction.

As we've seen earlier, how people or societies deal with a given hazard may not be very straightforward, however, given that they are trying to deal with all sorts of ordinary stresses. As a former Geography Department chair, Dr. Judith Tyner, described chairing, "there are important things and there are urgent things. Unfortunately, they're not the same things." That comment captures a lot of the discrepancy between knowing about a hazard and doing something about it. It's a little hard to focus on something as important as effective adjustment to hazard when you're worrying about personal or societal problems of pressing urgency.

As individuals, certain factors affect our adoption of adjustments or our choice of particular ones:

• Experience. Going through a particular kind of disaster affects perception of that hazard: People who have been through a particular type of disaster generally have somewhat more accurate perceptions of their vulnerability to it. Someone who's written a lot about this and gets cited by everybody is Risa Palm, for example: Palm, Risa, and Hodgson, Michael E. 1992. After a California Earthquake: Attitude and Behavior Change. University of Chicago Press. Unfortunately, the evidence for cross-sensitization from experience with one familiar hazard to other hazards that threaten a person is pretty thin (see the perceptions lecture and the Knuth et al. 2013 and the Whitmarsh (2008) articles discussed there).

• Wealth often affects the safety of your location and the structural resiliency of the buildings you occupy there. It also, obviously, describes the assets you have to pay for your losses and resume your lifestyle after a disaster. Wealth sets your ability, if not your willingness, to pay insurance. Wealth is generally associated with your knowledge of "how the system works" and your political influence and ability to command social resources after an event. Research on the adjustment behavior of the well-to-do has turned up some counterintuitive results, however, at least in the insurance purchase arena. One would think that greater wealth gives a person more to lose, on the one hand, and more resources to buy insurance on the other. But there is some evidence that greater wealth means that the amount of potential loss is a smaller proportion of a person's holdings, which perversely decreases the desire to buy insurance.
  • Eugenie Rovai found that, in Ferndale at least, the proportion of households with earthquake insurance rose with income ... and then fell for the wealthiest households. Rovai, Eugenie. 1994. The social geography of disaster recovery: Differential response to the North Coast earthquakes. Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 56: 49-74 (not available through CSULB, unfortunately)

  • Ganderton et al. actually found a negative effect of greater wealth on buying insurance. Ganderton, Philip T.; Brookshire, David S.; McKee, Michael; Stewart, Steve; and Thurston, Hale. 2000. Buying insurance for disaster-type risks: Experimental evidence. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 20, 3: 271-278.

  • Perhaps wealthier people are more confident of their ability to command social resources, such as governmental assistance, because of their own resources and understanding of the whole system.

  • Actually, there isn't much literature out there about this effect, meaning it could be a great topic for a thesis, based on interviewing a spectrum of individuals, rich, middle income, and poor, to find out whether they have flood, fire, or earthquake insurance and why/why not. There's a lot of material out there on why people choose to buy insurance of various sorts but it's "crickets" on how household wealth affects that decision, other than these older pieces.

• Personality (risk tolerance, fatalism, confidence in their own effectivity, laziness, religious attitudes).

  • Ronald Perry and Michael Lindell showed that perception of hazards is not a good predictor of protective adjustments at the individual and household level. The one positive finding was that people whose personalities give them a strong sense of personal responsibility for self-protection will tend to engage in self-protective adjustments, if they have experienced property loss in the past due to a disaster. Perry Ronald W., and Lindell, Michael K. 2008. Volcanic risk perception and adjustment in a multi-hazard environment. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 172, 3-4: 170-178.

  • A classic study examining the rôle of fatalism, as it varies between two versions of Protestant religion. Religiously-influenced fatalism affects people's willingness to take effective measures to mitigate tornado risk in response to warnings was written in 1972. The authors compared two areas in the United States with roughly comparable tornado touchdowns (South and Midwest, specifically Alabama and Illinois) but different death rates (the South had much higher fatalities). They connected this with the fatalistic tone in Southern religion, with its predestination philosophy, and the attitudes fostered in the Protestant work-ethic of Midwestern religion. Fatalists didn't do much in response to warnings and, thus, got killed more frequently; the can-do types figured "God saves them as saves themselves" and took effective action, leading to higher survival rates. Sims, John H. and Baumann, Duane D. 1972. The tornado threat: Different coping styles of the North and South. Science 176, 4042 (30 June): 1386-1392.

  • An interesting exploration of this theme, this time focussing on Islam and earthquake perceptions and adjustments, was done by Thomas Paradise in 2008. Focussing on Agaddir, Morocco, he found that class affects the degree of fatalism within a Muslim society, with better-off people less fatalistic, except in the case of earthquakes. The Quran has a specific reference to earthquakes (Sura 99). At the end of the world, there will be a final earthquake, and Allah's final judgment of all souls will take place then. So, taking action to mitigate earthquake hazard is often seen by the most religious as potentially an affront to how God plans to time the final judgment, and if the next earthquake is this final earthquake, anything anyone does to protect themselves will do them no good and might make their situation even worse by alienating God. Paradise, Thomas R. 2008. Islam and earthquakes: Seismic risk perception in a Muslim city. Islamic Law and Culture 10, 2: 216-233.

Possible individual or social adjustments available to those who perceive hazard:

• Just accept the loss (crap happens school of thought):

  • Political conservatives like to minimize government intervention outside defense and law and order and, so, theoretically sometimes endorse this idea.

  • Let the markets decide: You get hit, you lose; value of property declines. This is an individual problem that individuals should take responsibility for without burdening other taxpayers.

  • Politically really unrealistic, especially when disaster hits wealthy, often otherwise politically conservative areas. These will be the first to demand government assistance and the most effective at garnering political support for assistance.

• Modify the loss burden or share the losses around. This takes the form of disaster aid and of insurance.

  • Disaster aid, driven by humanitarian/humane concern after a disaster.

    • Entities involved:

      • Governments (e.g., FEMA, Small Business Administration, State OES, National Guard)

      • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs, such as the Red Cross, Médicins sans Frontières, religious disaster response organizations)

      • Private donors (the outpouring of donations after the Sumatra tsunami and the marshaling of donations by the Haïtian diaspora for the stricken in their original homeland).

    • This can be quite uneven, which can degrade the efficiency and equity of response, restoration, and reconstruction

      • Media skew, as we've already seen, shapes the collective view or impression of a disaster and may incorporate pretty systematic social biases for a variety of unconscious and intentional reasons (e.g., the Northridge earthquake, Rovai and Rodrigue 1998, the comments made to me by the San Francisco Chronicle reporter about his stint with the L.A. Times in San Diego)

      • Some disasters are more mediagenic, easier to fit a narrative around. It's easier to do a story on a sudden-onset disaster that brings spectacular or sensational imagery with it (e.g., the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment building, the falling WTC towers, the Santa Barbara fires) and less easy to do so in a slow-moving disaster in a place far, far away (e.g., drought in the African Sahel)

      • Emphasis on victims, not later success stories. The pictures of victims are associated with the emergency response phase, and the media jump on to the next emergency. This has been linked to donor fatigue. For a discussion of this topic, check out Alexander, David E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Oxford University Press.

    • It is absolutely critical that aid be delivered during the "golden hours" after a disaster, because individuals' capacity to survive injury drops exponentially with time.

      • A major event, such as the Morocco quake of 2023, will see people who could survive dying even as international aid struggles to overcome logistics of organizing and delivering assistance simply because effective assistance won't get there during the golden hours.

      • In many events, rescues are done by neighbors, family, friends, and strangers in the area rather than by professional responders (e.g., Mexico City earthquake, Libya floods, Morocco earthquake). In many ways, the "first-responder" nomenclature is a little misleading: The real "first" responders are the people right next to a stricken person; the firefighters, paramedics, and police are the first professional responders. See Drabek, Thomas E., and McEntire, David A. 2003. Emergent phenomena and the sociology of disaster: Lessons, trends, and opportunities from the research literature. Disaster Prevention and Management 12, 2: 97-112.

      • Training the community is an approach that can save lives in light of the fact that neighborhoods can be utterly on their own, without access to disaster aid, during the golden hours (e.g., L.A.Fire Department Community Emergency Response Training -- http://www.cert-la.com/)

    • Disaster aid can be singularly inappropriate:

      • Some assistance organizations have very hierarchical, almost militarized ways of managing their own affairs during disaster, and this can be offputting to the communities they are trying to help (e.g., how CDC nearly lost control of the Hanta virus situation in Navajo communities back in 1993 as they swarmed the area trying to figure out the virus involved and its vectors).

      • Cultural issues can misfire between communities and would-be aid providers (food assistance, different styles of recognizing and communicating needs, misunderstanding gender issues, past history between a country and another trying to offer assistance): This can be a minefield for emergency managers.

        • Foods provided may be culturally inappropriate (e.g., Spam for a Muslim community)

        • Assistance to resume agriculture after disaster in Africa often overlooks the female dominance of actual agriculture there, mistargeting information to the presumed "head of household"

        • Sometimes countries may fear being deluged with helpers from other countries who may converge chaotically and actually undermine local efforts. This concern has been raised by Morocco, which is trying to meter in enough help from a few countries nearby and avoid getting swamped. Leicester, John. 2023. Rescue teams are frustrated that Morocco did not accept more international help after earthquake. Associated Press newswire, 12 September, available here.

        • Many cultures encourage a somewhat circuitous communication style to ask for help, out of deference and respect for aid providers, but it can exasperate responders who think people are being evasive or something.

        • Many countries have recent histories of hostilities that can get in the way, first, of offering help and, second, of accepting offered help (e.g., India and Pakistan during the latter's flood disaster in 2010).

        • Some countries have histories of imperialism or colonialism with others and that can very seriously raise hackles and complicate assistance (e.g., the US and Haïti)

        • Sometimes a disaster happens in an area experiencing internal strife or even civil war. The Derna floods in Libya exemplify this: Libya has been in political strife ever since the dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was deposed and killed in the Arab Spring of 2011. There are two main rival governmental administrations running the eastern (where Derna is) and western (internationally recognized administration) parts of the country and all sorts of militias in the south. This is frustrating aid from outside, which has to go through the western government but get approval also from the government around Derna. Jeffery, Jack. 2023. How Libya's chaos left its people vulnerable to deadly flooding. Associated Press newswire, 13 September, available here.

        • How many emergency managers or first-responders would have reason to be aware of some of these culturally specific issues? Not knowing about them could make life more than usually challenging if someone innocently steps on one of these cultural mines.

        • A newspaper story about the Sin Nombre Hantavirus outbreak of 1993 captures some of the cultural dimensions of dealing with disaster, with medical investigators, news reporters, and Navajo interacting in the wake of this terrifying disease outbreak: Korte, Tim. 1994. Deadly desert plague left scars on kin of victims. Los Angeles Times (29 May).

    • Disaster aid is needed in a major disaster throughout the disaster cycle of response, restoration, reconstruction (and mitigation of and preparation for the next event). The stages after the emergency response are less "newsworthy," however, and, as events drop off the news cycle, critical disaster aid may very dwindle and come to a premature end.

      • How much are we hearing about Haïti these days? Thousands of people are still in tent cities or, kicked out of them (all but one official tent city has been closed down, not necessarily with the sheltering of their residents), in makeshift new slums. They are extraordinarily vulnerable to hurricanes, and the tent cities and newly organized slums are extremely vulnerable to fire. Meanwhile, cholera has become endemic to the island, brought there apparently by aid workers in the months after the earthquake, and tent cities and slums without reliable sources of clean water facilitate its spread. This cascading disaster is nearly absent from media these days, except for a brief flurry of attention on the fifth and then the tenth anniversary of the August 2010 event, which took 220,000 lives. Here's an article on the occasion of the tenth anniversary: Laillet, Valerie. 2020. Haiti 10 years later: Temporary tent city turns into makeshift community for 300,000. Global News, Canada (12 January). Available Here.

      • Aid in any disaster quickly becomes spotty and uneven. In another example, first-responders to 9/11 and the surrounding communities are to this day suffering from the effects of that day, both physically and emotionally and, as memory fades, sometimes common decency does, too (think of the politics over whether first-responders' chronic respiratory illnesses should be covered -- the 9/11 First Responders Health Care Bill finally passing in 2010). In September, 2023, the news broke that the number of firefighters who have died from 9/11-related diseases has just reached the number who died on that day. Another 11,000 have 9/11 diseases, including 3,500 with cancer. Halpert, Madeline. 2023. Over 340 first responders have died from 9/11 illnesses. BBC, US & Canada section (25 September). Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66917700 http://www.pbs.com/newshour/rundown/senate-may-vote-on-911-health-bill

    • An aid issue of increasing salience in the hazards community is how to distinguish between disaster aid and development aid. The David Alexander book, Confronting Catastrophe, mentioned earlier has a good exploration of these issues.

      • Recovery to "normalcy" is often the tacit goal of disaster aid.

      • But what if normalcy is horrible? What if normal conditions are precisely what put people in harm's way and limit their ability to reduce their risk in any meaningful way or recover after an event? Returning slum dwellers on the edges of cities hit by Hurricane Mitch (1998, Central America) to the very "normal" conditions that made them so vulnerable in the first place was scarcely "aid."

      • Problems with dependency and strings-attached aid:

        • Aid can be structured in such a way as to protract people's dependency on it (e.g., needing to stay in a refugee camp to have access to food assistance during a drought and famine because of the logistical impossibility of getting assistance into remote rural areas, where people eventually need to return in order to resume agriculture and animal husbandry).

        • It is common for donor nations to require that monetary assistance be used only to buy products from the donor nation or for lending institutions (e.g., IMF) to demand certain austerity measures in exchange for loans.

  • Insurance

    • Insurance tends to be a relatively common loss-sharing strategy in the more developed countries.

      • The idea is that a whole bunch of us pay into a premium pool, relatively small amounts at a time.

      • In exchange for this, we can get the particular losses the policy covers reimbursed at various levels.

      • This is tantamount to sharing the loss among all policyholders and spreading the losses out over time.

    • Frustrating the widespread adoption of insurance is an expectation that government will "do something about it" when disaster hits. A recent study explored the economic logic of potential insurance policyholders who anticipate that government will step in and help them in a disaster: To the extent that they anticipated assistance, they off-loaded some of their own responsibility to estimate and cover their potential losses. Raschky, Paul A., and Weck-Hannemann, Hannelore. 2007. Charity hazard -- a real hazard to natural disaster insurance. Environmental Hazards 7: 321-329.

    • Also blocking the spread of insurance is cost: Insurance can be very expensive.

      • Because of the cost, those who know they have extreme risk are likeliest to get insurance, meaning that the pool of policyholders is too narrow to distribute risk meaningfully. Those with little risk (or those who think they have little risk) will eschew insurance.

      • This is called "adverse selection," and it seriously impairs the effectiveness of insurance as a risk-sharing system.

      • Another variant is that, once someone buys insurance, they may be less motivated to reduce their risks, which is called "moral hazard"

      • To be sure, insurance companies play somewhat similar adverse selection games themselves: As seen amid the storm and fury of the national debate on health insurance reform, insurance companies have long tried to reduce their pool of policyholders to the healthiest individuals, if they can.

      • There is, hearteningly, some recent evidence that adverse selection and moral hazard may be countered by advantageous selection. Perhaps the decision to buy insurance is mainly a function of how risk-averse a person is. Risk-averse people will buy insurance as a part of a package of behaviors meant to reduce risk overall, including mitigation and preparation activities. Such individuals may not get too cavalier about their risks just because they've purchased insurance. Hudson, Paul; Botzen, W.J. Wouter; Czajkowski, Jeffrey; and Kreibich, Heidi. 2014. Risk selection and moral hazard in natural disaster insurance markets: Empirical evidence from Germany and the United States. Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, The Wharton School, Univerity of Pennsylvania, Working Paper #2014-07. Available at http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WP201407-Risk-Selection-in-Natural-Disaster-Insurance-Markets.pdf

    • Very recently, in the face of extreme wildfires produced as temperatures rise and vegetation dries sooner in the year, major insurers are pulling out of the homeowners and fire insurance business in California, even as hurricane losses have caused some to abandon Florida.
      • Insurers must participate in the State FAIR Plan, an assigned risk pool by which homes in the Wildfire-Urban Interface (WUI) get the fire coverage demanded by mortgage companies. They must accept properties assigned to them randomly to a proportion similar to their market share in California. For them, a huge problem is that the insurance premia have to be "affordable," which means they can't charge an amount that would allow them to defray the risk exposure they're taking on. They've always hated the situation, but did not want to give up the California market.

      • Insurance companies have insurance policies themselves, with companies called re-insurers. The re-insurers have been denying them insurance coverage because of the expanding scale of losses in California, which has forced insurers to walk away from the California market because they can't get the insurance they need to cover insurance claims on their own policies.

      • On the positive side, this has finally compelled discussion in California about homeowners taking on more responsibility for their own protection and the possibility of zoning new residential construction out of the WUI.

      • For a synopsis of this emerging situation: Gail, Melanie. 2023. Why insurance companies are pulling out of California and Florida, and how to fix some of the underlying problems. , 7 June, available here.

• Modify the hazard events: Another option in adjusting to a hazardous world.

  • In general, human society is pretty feeble in stopping things like earthquakes, tsunami, volcanic eruptions, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, great winter storms, wind storms

  • We have marginally more ability to prevent flooding through dam and levée construction and fires through prescribed burning and other forms of fuel management

    • Even here, our mitigations often protect us against recurrent lower level disasters by increasing the risk of larger, rarer disasters

    • This is, in fact, one of the major findings in hazards research

  • Think about how thoroughly levéed up the Mississippi River drainage is and how that does reduce the risk of annual overbank flooding. But, every so often, we get a very rare constellation of events that produces rain or melt so fast the water tops even this impressive engineering system: 1993 and 2011 floods and the 211 days of flood stage in 2018-19.

  • The levées in New Orleans failed in Katrina, which was "only" a Category 3 storm at the moment it made landfall.

  • Dams have failed catastrophically: In Bouquet Canyon, the Saint Francis Dam collapsed in 1928, which killed more than 450 people in the Santa Clarita Valley of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

    • This is a short overview of the disaster: http://lamorguefiles.blogspot.com/2014/03/mullhollands-st- francis-dam-disaster-in.html

    • Here is a GIS-based animation reconstructing the flood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MdB_s6KhwA

    • Here are images from the Los Angeles Times: http://framework.latimes.com/2013/03/12/st-francis-dam- collapse/

  • The Big Tujunga Dam, built in 1931, withstood the tremendous floods of 1938 but lost a quarter of its capacity due to sedimentation behind the dam in that one year. The dam requires recurrent dredging to maintain its flood control function.

  • Wildfires in chaparral are quickly spotted and snuffed (by some of you, perhaps!), but the more effective that firefighting is, the larger the fuel load grows. Both the probability and the magnitude of a landscape-clearing fire can grow through time (though a strong enough Santa Ana can create such a fire even without much regrowth in a recent burn).

• An adjustment with the highest potential (if nowhere near fully realized) is to modify human vulnerability through mitigation.

  • The idea behind mitigation is to alter the way that structures transmit a disaster's forces and processes to human bodies.

  • We have a lot more ability to modify human vulnerability through hazard-resistant structures, land-use planning, and public education.

  • Disaster planning can involve mitigations built into a municipal general plan's safety element in policy response to risk assessment. In California, all municipal general plans have seven mandated elements: land use/zoning, circulation/transportation, housing, conservation, open space, noise, and safety. Cities and counties in the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District are additionally required to have an air quality element. Many others with sizable disadvantaged communities are required to address environmental justice (including air quality) as well. Disaster mitigation plans can be implemented through the safety element and compatible requirements under the other six elements, such as land use zoning, housing, and open space. Simply knowing and understanding the mandated and required elements can get many of you through the interview process to get jobs and internships in planning agencies. To learn more about these, in case you are considering a career in planning, take a look at Ch. 4, "Required elements," of the State of California Office of Planning and Research General Plan Guidelines.Available at https://opr.ca.gov/docs/OPR_C4_final.pdf.

  • In response to disaster planning, government can impose building codes for seismic or fire resistance, but this is more easily said than done.

    • There is predictable political resistance to government-imposed mandates by interests whose oxes are gored (e.g., developers and homeowners), with struggles over such issues as shake rooves and construction on floodplains. Resistance to mitigations can also be triggered by people's attachment to place and dislike of changes such mitigations and requirements might make to a familiar location (e.g., brush clearance and tree removal).

    • Even with good codes, construction may still fail to conform to code (cost-cutting shortcuts that builders and developers take and normal human laziness or inattentiveness, e.g., the Northridge Meadows apartment building)

    • Faulty inspection (corruption, laziness, e.g., Kocaeli earthquake in Turkey in 1999). This case is explored in Green, Penny. 2005. Disaster by design: Corruption, construction, and catastrophe. British Journal of Criminology 45, 4: 528-546.

    • Good inspection does not necessarily translate into effective action on recommendations or requirements. The WTC towers were thoroughly inspected after the 1993 bombing. Inspectors literally crawled through spaces between floors and ceilings to examine the joists. They found that, in the original construction, fireproofing had not been sprayed on to the specified thickness completely covering the joists. Photos showed them to be thinly spattered in some places, bare in others, and generally kind of shoddily covered. They recommended that these be redone properly, which they weren't. The engineering analysis I attended two months later showed these photos and recommendations and argued that the buildings would have stood longer or not collapsed had this retrofitting been done. The heat from the fires softened the metal of the exposed joists, transmitting it to the bolts and welds, which softened and, when one of the floors slipped the softened bolts, its weight took down the next and pretty soon the weight was so great that even still cold and strong support bolts and joists could not withstand the free-falling mass. This was at the Learning from Disasters Workshop held at the New York University Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems, which was organized to bring natural scientists, social scientists, and engineers together with emergency managers in New York in December 2001.

  • As individuals, we can mitigate our risk by structural modifications (e.g., foundation bolting), non-structural modifications (strapping water heaters and furniture and installing smoke detectors), getting insurance, and preparing emergency kits and procedures (but laziness and discomfort and being swamped with other concerns get in the way of that: How many of you emergency professionals have followed through on such recommendations?...).

• Another effective, if underutilized, adjustment is to modify human vulnerability through preparation.

  • Preparation pre-stages emergency response. It consists of pre-arranged and pre-practiced emergency measures designed to reduce loss of life, injury, and property damage in the aftermath of a future disaster

  • This can include agreements to implement an Incident Command System (ICS), which clarifies how different agencies coöperate and works out their chains-of-command before an incident and typically includes mock drills to allow different agencies a chance to work with one another in the heat of a simulated disaster.

  • Another part of preparation is evaluating and selecting evacuation routes and refuge areas and notifying residents (a notable failure during Hurricane Katrina). This is something that can be very substantially assisted through Depiction or other GIS-based analytic systems. A "plot complication," however, is that not everyone who receives evacuation orders/recommendations and is shown a map can understand it. A sobering article is Zarcadoolas, Christina; Boyer, Jennefer; Krishnaswami, Arthi; and Rothenberg, Andrea. 2007. GIS maps to communicate emergency preparedness: How useable are they for inner city residents? Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 4, 3: Article 16. As much as it pains a geographer, for whom maps are an intuitive form of graphic communication, many people seem unable to interpret them and are simply not spatial thinkers.

  • Triage is the grim battlefield-derived medical decision- making that must be done on the fly -- but trained for and prepared for ahead of time to separate out disaster victims into three categories:

    • Those who will survive no matter what, though they may be in considerable pain (they will not be given treatment or even drugs if these are scarce).

    • Those who will not survive even if heroic medical efforts are taken (they will also not be treated in an emergency when medical personnel are overwhelmed and drugs are in scarce supply).

    • Those who will not survive without treatment but who can survive if given treatment (these are the only ones to get treatment in disaster conditions).

  • Preparation also includes ongoing risk assessment programs to learn about potential hazards (safety element revision).

    • Some events can be predicted rather accurately (e.g., hurricane landfall) while others can be more roughly and probabilistically predicted. At whichever level, such prediction is a key goal of risk assessment science.

    • Risk assessment science should ideally produce graduated systems of increasingly actionable prediction: Prediction, forecasting, and warning.

      • Scientific understanding of a hazard hopefully evolves into prediction, perhaps long term and probabilistic and then short term predictions.

      • Predictions become forecasts, which contain information about the magnitude, duration, and location of a particular menace but do not include anything about what to do about it.

      • Forecasts become the basis of warnings, which not only incorporate the forecast, but suggest appropriate actions to take.

  • A critical part of preparation entails communication from response institutions and the public and from the public to response institutions.

    • Risk education notifies residents about the hazards potentially affecting them, while risk communication makes more specific statements about what to do immediately before, during, and shortly after an event.

    • Risk education and risk communication are more top-down communications, but individuals are information-seekers when a risk has broken through their threshold of concern: They engage in bottom-up and lateral attempts to learn more and ground-truth what they've learned, and this information-seeking activity is an opportunity for agencies to present information in a consistent and clear manner.

    • Increasingly, the public can provide eyes-on-the-ground information in near real-time to responding agencies through social media: X-Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram have been especially notable in this regard. As ever, this information can be contaminated by rumor-mongering, trolling, and honest mistakes. With all its warts, such volunteered geographic information can fill gaps in more ordinary intra-agency and inter-agency communications and is well worth exploring to develop discernment in its interpretation and open two-way risk communication with the public.

    • Communication is an individual and household need as much as it is an agency or government need: Individuals can also try to think out what they should do in different emergencies, designate a single person outside the area to get and distribute news in a family (to keep down the burden on the telecommunications system), designate a meeting area outside the home, take emergency response training, and learn about first-aid. Such household-level communication and planning is just as important within first-responder households as it is in any other household, and knowing that your family and friends have a good idea about what to do and an agreed-on plan can take some of the personal anxiety burden off first-responders so that they can focus on their duties (and not go off stealing helicopters to rescue family members, per the "San Andreas" movie!).

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