Not by technology alone

Incompetence, avarice, and collusion

The companies concerned will, presumably, add to the existing construction on the wetlands around New Orleans – which provide vital protection against flooding and tidal surges but whose protective effect has been substantially reduced by drainage for construction; further, the federal government has tied all environmental funding to the promotion of interstate commerce. (A similar problem has occurred in southern England, where in some areas planning regulations were abolished in pursuit of the free-market ideology, despite municipal engineers’ warnings. Building contractors made huge profits on the deregulated floodplains, and the new residents were inevitably the victims of severe winter flooding. Now the owners of the houses cannot get insurance for their properties and cannot find buyers when they seek to sell.)

This kind of wretched tale of incompetence, avarice, and collusion between big money, politicians, and – possibly – sections of the mass media is only too familiar. After the tsunami of December 2004, the US Geological Survey staff and the US military were cited as saying they did not know whom to contact, and no official spokespeople seem to have been challenged over the failure even to telephone international media organisations or the Washington embassies of the states affected. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) did, however, contact the US military base in the British colony of Diego Garcia to notify them of an approaching deadly wave. In fact Diego Garcia is on the western edge of the Chagos Trench, which is more than 15,000 feet deep and absorbed much of the tsunami’s energy; the coral reef to the east of the island may also have helped break up the tsunami, and the service personnel on the island reported only a minor increase in wave activity.

As to post-tsunami responses, letters from private citizens to the UK press castigated the Diego Garcia base for making no attempt to warn the states of the Indian Ocean littoral about the approaching danger. It also emerged in public that an NOAA official emailed Indonesian officials but made no further attempt at contact. One commentator said it was ‘beyond belief that the officials at the NOAA could not find any method to directly and immediately contact civilian authorities in the area’. The NOAA’s slogan is ‘Working together to save lives.’

US-South Asia parallels

It would seem then, that irrespective of the existence and availability of technology and techniques, the crucial factors have to do with the preparedness and willingness of people and institutions both to maintain physical and systemic infrastructure at all times and to act quickly when disaster does strike. Those features have been manifestly lacking, but – even worse – are still lacking. While ordinary people’s post-tsunami donations have been channelled into relief efforts by international NGOs, much of the hundreds of millions promised by states has simply not been paid. The recent and terrible earthquake in South Asia is yet another example of the fact that the powerful simply do not want to learn or act unless they themselves suffer political damage. It has taken India and Pakistan weeks to agree to open the Line of Control for relief efforts, and as to transport, the United States, which documentedly has fleets of helicopters lying idle in Iraq, has offered a bare handful from its matériel in Afghanistan. The Government of India was among those states which refused funding for undersea seismic recording systems which would have foretold the tsunami-causing earthquake of December 2004. In effect, India, the so-called emerging superpower, apparently has no disaster-management policy.

The parallels between the South Asian and the American responses to the recent disasters are striking. As always it is the poor who are hit hardest. They are the most exposed, have the least chance of escape, and usually get the least help afterwards. Neither are officials in South Asia any less culpable than those in the United States. In South Asia, official attitudes are familiar enough, but in the United States some very old truths have resurfaced. The overwhelming bulk of Katrina’s victims are poor and black. For centuries, African-Americans have had next to no voice in the politics of the United States, and it has even been said that, since the start of the Reagan presidency in 1980, significant Supreme Court rulings and federal tax cuts (such as the impending abolition of death duties on estates) have been intended to harm them and to favour the rich, who are overwhelmingly white. Even African-Americans’ access to the most formal elements of the political system has been severely restricted. Byzantine voter-registration procedures, many of which in the southern states were designed to make it as hard as possible for black voters to register, mean that African-Americans are hugely underrepresented on the states’ electoral rolls. They are people whom, it seems, America does not want to think about. They are the single poorest group in the US, large proportions of them are not on the voting lists, and even if they are and even if they vote, they certainly do not vote Republican. Indeed it is not even clear if President Bush and his Republican cohorts regard them as Americans at all.

Accountability and the price of neglect

It is, further, worth noting that while we can criticize states for their failures over natural and other disasters, the private sector – which so dominates the rhetoric of contemporary political economy and is so quick to exploit technology in the service of profit – is deafeningly silent after every disaster. Moreover, it has been noted in other contexts that criminal law cannot cope with culpability on a very large scale. The nature of its concepts of individual intention and possibly also of causation, even in questions of gross negligence such as those which arise in our responses to natural disasters, render it at best an awkward instrument with which to enforce accountability in respect of large-scale failures in the public or private sectors. Yet the fact remains that states, being publicly-constituted entities, at least have to answer in some way, even if their answers are often grossly inadequate.

We might feel powerless to alter the conduct of states, but unless we attempt serious engagement with institutions and processes of state we too shall be complicit in the failures of maintenance, supervision, and organization which so often precede catastrophic disaster and exacerbate its effects so greatly. This will mean recognizing that systems and organization are as important as technological developments, and it will mean recognizing something that goes totally against the managerial rhetoric and public-relations babble that constitute the contemporary Zeitgeist. Serious maintenance and preparedness are unglamorous, expensive, and often unseen; they have to be carried out by people who know their work and have to be paid properly to do it, and they have to be carried out because we all share the risks of failure. The price of neglecting maintenance and preparedness, however, is colossally, unimaginably, worse.

This article is based on a wide range of sources, including the author’s articles in The Hindu on 13 January 2005 and 7 September 2005 respectively. We are most grateful to The Hindu for permission to use material from those two articles.