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18Understanding Urban Safety and SecurityBox 1.4 Conventional wisdom about natural andhuman-made disasters• Natural and human-made disasters are not predictable.• They are indeed largely ‘natural’ (i.e. caused by changes in nature).• Their occurrence is independent of human behaviour.• As a result of the above, the major issues for policy concern are preparedness, mitigation,relief and recovery.• Disasters can occur anywhere; they are largely independent of locality.• Recovery from disasters means restoring the conditions existing before the disaster, andnot addressing the conditions that may have contributed to the disaster.• The responsibility of government is largely immediate relief, risk management and providinginsurance. The response of government is usually to ‘manage the problem’ and not toundertake steps to remedy causal factors.• While the responses of government and voluntary organizations are helpful, they areusually inadequate in relation to the scale and depth of needs.• Political reactions to disasters rarely go beyond ‘the blame game’, assigning responsibilityrather than mobilizing political support for sustainable solutions.other forms of disasters combined. 81 The heat wave in southIndia in May 2002 was also very dramatic, with temperaturesof up to 50 degrees Celsius. Increased frequency ofextreme weather events has been particularly evident inCentral America and the Caribbean: Hurricane Mitchaffected Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998; landslides andflooding killed many people in Guatemala in 2005; andCaribbean hurricanes during the period of 2002 to 2005 hitthe whole region, particularly Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and theYucatan Peninsula in Mexico.Conventional wisdom at the global level about naturaland human-made disasters, described in Box 1.4, contributeslittle towards alleviating growing threats to urban safety andsecurity from such disasters.In contrast, detailed descriptions and analyses ofindividual natural and human-made disasters suggest insightsthat directly challenge conventional wisdom and tenets (seeBox 1.5).The conclusions in Box 1.5 suggest alternativepolicies and approaches to conventional wisdom. Two principalpolicy messages emerge: first, it is important to betterunderstand how human behaviour contributes to disasters;and, second, more needs to be done to prevent disastersfrom happening.These messages also focus more attention on thedistinction between natural and human-made (includingtechnological) disasters. Major industrial accidents – such asthe Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, during the1980s; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 in the thenSoviet Union; an oil pipeline explosion in Lagos in 2006; achemical plant explosion in Jilin, China, in 2005; and a fertilizerplant explosion in Toulouse, France, in 2001 – alldemonstrate that technologically induced disasters can occurin all regions of the world, regardless of income level (seeChapter 7). Indeed, analysis of the location of technologicaldisasters concludes that greatest risk has accumulated inBox 1.5 Disaster experiences that challenge conventional wisdom• Natural and human-made disasters are largely predictable within historicalpatterns of probability and within specific regions and locations. Thesepredictable patterns suggest that some regions are highly susceptible tothese events, even though the specific location and timing of such events maybe predictable only within wider parameters of time. An example would bethe likelihood of hurricanes in countries bordering the Gulf of Mexico duringthe period of June to October each year.• The locus of the impact of natural and human-made disasters is closelyrelated to pre-disaster conditions – for example, mudslides and flooding arelikely to occur in valleys where deforestation has occurred, as in the cases ofHaiti and Guatemala.• Individual large-scale disasters fit into broader regional patterns of specifictypes, death and injury tolls, homeless and affected, and financial andeconomic losses.• The performance of infrastructure – roads, drains, bridges, electricitynetworks or water supply systems – in withstanding disasters is a goodindicator of the pre-disaster capacity of institutions to manage, operate andmaintain infrastructure. An example would be insufficient maintenance of thedrainage system of Mumbai prior to the annual monsoon season (June toSeptember).• The risk profiles of increasingly large and dense urban centres of all sizesindicate that the vulnerability of urban populations can be enormous, asdemonstrated by the large numbers of victims of earthquake events, such asthe 250,000 82 death toll of the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 in northeastChina, as well as the 86,000 deaths and destruction of millions of homesresulting from the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.• The profile of victims of disasters shows a disproportionate share of women,children, elderly and disabled populations. This is well illustrated in the caseof the Indian Ocean Tsunami, where female victims outnumbered malevictims in a number of places, as shown in Chapter 7.• Natural and human-made disasters are not events, but processes, in whichprevious historical responses to events contribute heavily to the degree ofpreparedness and the extent and nature of impacts. The impacts of hurricaneson the Florida coast have been relatively contained as experience hasgrown about preparedness and evacuation procedures.• The extent of the impact of a disaster is closely related to the capacity ofinstitutions and the public to learn and adjust from previous experiences.The national mobilization in The Netherlands following the 1953 floodscreated an enduring model of public education, which is now being applied topreparations to confront the anticipated rise in sea levels due to globalwarming. The more that people understand likely impacts, the more likelythey will prepare for and/or evacuate situations of increasing risk. The differencesin evacuation experiences between New Orleans and Houston in2005 in anticipation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita demonstrate the importanceof public awareness.• Rather than assume that the impacts of disasters are independent of politics,it is apparent that political will plays a large role in the degree of preparedness,the nature of the short-term public response, and the medium- andlonger-term processes of recovery.• Recovery from disasters offers important opportunities to address underlyingcauses, problems and institutional incapacities. Reform during recoveryfrom disaster has a greater chance of success than reform during periods of‘business as usual’. This experience is well illustrated by the way in whichnew women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communitygroups assumed a larger role in community decision-making in the relief andrecovery process following earthquakes in Bursa (Turkey) and Surat (India).