Natural Disasters in an Era of Global Change

Faculty OpEd

by Costas Synolakis

Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Sumatran mega-tsunami remind us how vulnerable we all are to natural disasters, irrespective of the technological prowess of the nation victimized by the catastrophe. The death toll from Katrina was far less than in Sumatra, primarily because hurricanes move at a fraction of the speed of a tsunami – there is more time to warn and evacuate. But Katrina's economic impact – estimated to be over $100 billion – dwarfed the impact of the tsunami. Is this the result of the power of nature or overestimating our own power in planning for nature's fury?

Nature's power is a philosophical matter. The catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami, in which one-third of Lisbon’s population perished, profoundly influenced the Age of Enlightenment. (Modern estimates suggest that one in 10,000 people in the world died, compared to one in 40,000 from the Great Sumatran Tsunami). It was the first extreme natural disaster of modern times and transformed philosophical thinking by attempting to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with the existence of evil. In Candide, Voltaire was swept up by the arbitrariness of it all and challenged the papist view of "whatever is, is right". But Jean-Jacques Rousseau angrily defended the Church.

The Greeks were totally fascinated with another disaster, the Minoan eruption of the Thera volcano in the central Aegean where many believe the lost continent Atlantis existed. The sophisticated Minoans of Crete never recovered fully from the earthquake and tsunami occurring about 1600 BC, eventually succumbing to the advancing Northern Europeans. We learn of Atlantis in Plato's dialogs. His fascination with natural disasters preceded Voltaire's by two millennia, but the questions were largely the same.

No other modern natural disaster has captured the world's imagination more than the mega-tsunami of 2004. It directly impacted the economies of 20 different Indian Ocean nations. The death toll included citizens from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. It killed more Swedes that any other disaster during the past century. In contrast to this mega-tsunami, there was a warning issued before the July 2006 West Java tsunami. Yet, the death toll still exceeded 600 people. What went wrong again?

The worldwide emergency preparedness for tsunami disasters has been the focus of numerous UNESCO meetings, in Kobe, Paris, Mauritius, Rome, and Hyderabad. UNESCO's well-organized gatherings allowed access to donor resources and highlighted international state-of-the-art warning methodology, namely America's experience in the Pacific. Yet, many national delegations focused on local capabilities to build end-to-end systems, some of which were beyond science fiction even for first-world nations. Instant experts aggressively marketed copycat tsunameter technologies similar to those in place in the Northern Pacific by NOAA, at huge cost, and with no appreciation that their products had to detect tsunamis reliably the first time around. Stupendous amounts of time and resources were spent covering anew concepts addressed in the Pacific, decades ago. For some nations, the omnipresent buzzword “capacity building” became a metaphor for acquiring more of the technology already locally existing, instead of seeking to benefit from the state-of-the-art systems or international experience in warning dissemination. Acronyms abounded. Even seasoned professionals had trouble following the organizational charts, committee structures, assignments, and worse, monitoring progress. As a result, when the 2006 earthquake struck, Indonesia relied on newly acquired, untested technology to infer tsunami generation instead of common sense, public education and preparedness, with disastrous results.

The Viterbi School’s Tsunami Research Center has spent 20 years developing much of the technology powering NOAA's real-time tsunami forecasts. NOAA’s computational model comes from Vasily Titov's 1996 Ph.D. thesis aided by the elegant analytical results of another Viterbi Ph.D., Utku Kanoglu. The Viterbi model, along with NOAA's tsunameters deployed in the deep ocean have brought an impressive reduction in false alarms from the two warning centers protecting all Pacific Ocean nations. Viterbi products resulted in the timely cancellation of an emergency evacuation in Hawaii. The last time Honolulu was unnecessarily evacuated in 1987, it cost $30 million. Viterbi engineers have surveyed all except one of the 15 tsunamis striking the Pacific in the 15 years preceding the 2004 disaster. Findings from Viterbi fieldwork have produced an unprecedented database validating all modern tsunami modeling and forecast tools. We produced all of the maps for California’s emergency tsunami preparedness. Pro bono, we have advised many coastal communities on how to improve disaster plans. We have given hundreds of public outreach lectures in hospitals, churches, mosques, elementary schools, city halls and soccer stadiums in places ranging from False Pass, Alaska, to Rapanui, Chile (Easter Island), to Pentecost, Vanuatu, Aitape, Papua New Guinea and Mindoro in the Philippines. We explain that tsunamis are natural disasters and not the work of evil, unnatural forces, and outline simple steps that locals can take to protect themselves. Viterbi's Jose Borrero was the first scientist to enter Aceh on January 1, 2005, just days after the mega-tsunami. His work was featured in a National Geographic film, which helped put the disaster in perspective within a month of when it struck. The fieldwork has not been easy. Tsunami Research Center engineers travel to largely inaccessible locales in less developed nations, at a moment's notice on a shoestring budget that grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) allow. And reimbursement for expenses occurs many months afterwards.

But we were not prepared for the worst surprise of all – the massive loss of life occurring on December 26, 2004.

Most working engineers in natural hazard mitigation have thought extensively about what we could have done differently to prevent this type of disaster. As a community of scientists, we failed to anticipate the likelihood of a mega-tsunami in Aceh. However, as engineers, we did not fail. Well-engineered structures in Aceh survived both the tsunami and the long and extensive shaking from the 9.3 earthquake that preceded it. This is amazing, given the often-questionable practices in the third world.

NOAA produced an animation of the tsunami within 24 hours using a model developed at Viterbi 10 years earlier, and this animation was widely featured in the world media. In essence, we knew what happened, as soon as we understood the earthquake motion.

In hindsight, this was not unexpected. NSF grants for studying hypothetical disasters abroad – and for hypothetical disasters at home, such as Katrina – are scarce. When engineers do their work right, nobody notices. When we don't, everybody does. Katrina was not a failure of engineering paradigms, but a massive societal failure where there is undue emphasis is on short-term results, and not just in government. The NSF has repeatedly tried to eliminate most civil engineering research and development from its budget, apparently because it is less likely to produce rapid improvements in our quality of life. Science and Nature have published less than 20 stories and original research articles, before the worst tsunami in their entire history of more than 200 years combined. Practically the entire world follows the example of the U.S. in terms of research funding and innovation. So if civil engineering is undervalued here, why should it be any different in the rest of the world?

Civil engineers have solved most of the society's basic problems. Cities in Europe and the US have clean water and houses largely withstand disasters. But the thousands of digital cameras with intact memory cards found among the dead in 2004 suggest a different take. The images painfully highlight the last moments in the lives of the people who didn't know they were about to die. Victims were taking pictures of their loves ones with the tsunami in the background, not anticipating the deluge that would follow. They just didn't know any better. They could operate gadgets, but didn't know that a rapid shoreline recession resembling an ebbing tide was the harbinger of a massive tsunami and that they should be running away from the beach to high ground instead of wasting valuable seconds taking pictures.

Recent estimates presented in a special meeting of the Royal Society of London suggest that within our lifetimes we will experience a natural disaster that will kill more than one million people in minutes. For some cities such as Istanbul, Teheran or Tokyo, this is a low-end estimate. Global climate change will intensify floods and droughts; a one-meter sea level change in 100 years will make what we now consider as "extreme" events, annual events. We live in mega cities, and we cannot possibly be prepared for every eventuality, as 9/11 so dramatically underscores. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have focused exclusively on preventing a similar disaster. The 9/11 message, as well as that of the 2004 mega-tsunami or Katrina has been largely lost. We can do much to prevent terrorism, but we can’t do much to prevent natural disasters. But in the case of both terrorism and natural disasters, we can do much more to survive.

In civil engineering we refer to as the last mile. In an era of global citizenship when a lot of us travel for pleasure or business several times a year, how can we make sure that we are safe wherever we might be when disaster strikes? Can we economically engineer a structure to withstand the strike from a fuel-full 787? Can we engineer our cities so that neither global sea level change nor a mega-tsunami nor a megathrust earthquake nor a meteroid will impact us severely? Can we engineer a building, a dike or breakwater or instrument a natural hillside to monitor itself and inform us when maintenance or action is needed? Can we reduce the uncertainties in the predictions of the impact extreme events? Can we look ahead enough to educate ourselves to make the right decisions when disaster strikes and immediately take steps and save lives? What is the right balance between gadgetry, computational tools, medicine and emergency management? What tools do we need to understand this continuously changing balance? These are highly interdisciplinary questions we ponder at Viterbi, as we educate our engineers whose work will impact all of us in this 21st century.

To paraphrase Homer, one omen is best, defend the world we live in, our one universal homeland.
Costas Synolakis is a professor of civil engineering and director of the Tsunami Research Center in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.