← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Ready or Not
00:15:37
Kathryn Schulz and John Seabrook join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the place of natural disasters in the American consciousness.
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, July 23rd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker.
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C
When a storm hits, we've got to be ready. Education, preparation, that's what makes a difference. That's what saves lives. Make a plan. It's never too early.
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B
That was President Obama speaking from the Jersey Shore in May 2013, seven months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the region. In this week's issue, Katherine Schultz writes about a looming cataclysm, the massive earthquake and tsunami that is likely to hit in the next 50 years or so in the Pacific Northwest. She's here today with John Seabrook to discuss how we all deal with the risk of natural catastrophes. So, Katherine, you've scared us all. You've written a terrifying account of what will happen along the western coast when the Cascadia fault ruptures. You say it'll be the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Why is this news to so many of us? We know about the San Andreas Fault, but even Californians tend to draw a blank when you mention the Cascadia fault.
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D
I mean, I would say that within the region in the Pacific Northwest, there really is quite a lot of awareness of this issue. There's not necessarily very much action, but there is certainly a reasonably high level of understanding that the risk exists outside of the region. Apparently there isn't much awareness. It's kind of a sleeper crisis. And some of that is it's a relatively new one. We've known about the San Andreas Fault for a very, very long time. We actually only discovered this Pacific Northwest fault, the Cascadia Subduction zone, in the mid-1990s or discovered the threat that it poses to the region. So it hasn't long to seep into the cultural consciousness. You know, we aren't seeing major Hollywood blockbusters about the risk that it poses.
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B
Why did it take so long to discover?
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D
First of all, plate tectonics in general is a very young field. The field that kind of explains for us why earthquakes and tsunamis happen, or why a certain kind of earthquake and tsunami happens. The scientific community didn't really buy into that theory or that explanation until the mid to late 60s. And then there's something a little weird about the Cascadia subduction zone. It's very, very qu. If you live in any of these other areas that are prone to massive, massive earthquakes, you get a lot of little earthquakes in between and a lot of medium sized earthquakes. And a curious thing about the subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest is that it is kind of eerily silenced. And so no one really looked into it until very late in the game.
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B
And then you describe really vividly in the piece what will actually happen. Just give us a quick replay of that.
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D
Basically, what we know is this particular fault line over the last 10,000 years appears to have produced two main kinds of earthquakes. One is what we call the little kind. And by little we mean magnitude 8, magnitude about 8.5 or 6. So to be clear, that is not little in any context at all, except relatively. That's larger than most San Andreas fault quakes will ever be. The other scenario is the one that I lay out in detail in the piece, which is the entire Cascadia fault line ruptures at once. And in that case we're looking at at least a magnitude 9 earthquake. That's big and it's bad. And it really will affect essentially everybody living basically west of the Kesat Mountains in that region. And perhaps most cataclysmically, it will then trigger a tsunami, which, to be very clear, will only affect those living on the coastline within the tsunami inundation zone, which is a relatively small part of this region. So it's not like a tsunami is going to take out Portland, Oregon, but within that region, that long 700 mile strip of the Northwest coast, the devastation will be essentially complete.
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B
John moving to troubles back east. New York, as we all remember, was severely hit by Hurricane Sandy. Subways and almost all of the tunnels were flooded. Hospitals and homes were evacuated. It was really horrendous. And then you wrote for the magazine about the work of restoring just one particular area, which is the Jersey Shore. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and whether we have our infrastructure priorities, right?
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C
Yeah, I think the big thing in terms of sort of mindset change that Sandy caused was it really was the final nail in the coffin of this old notion that we can armor the coastline with hard structures, jetties, seawalls to keep the water out. The new philosophy is the water is going to come in and the best thing we can do is manage that. And so instead of hard structures, we're talking about soft structures, things like dunes in the case of the Jersey Shore or in the case of Manhattan, berms, which are planted, raised, sort of littoral areas between the water and the land that would help absorb some of the water flowing in. Also compartmentalizing the coastline in Manhattan so that if one area floods, the other area doesn't flood a lot more green roofs that would soak up rain. And then there are some hard structures, too. The niftiest one are these flip down panels that would come down from the fdr, drive down the south street seaport and keep the water out down there. In terms of the dune building in the Jersey Shore, this was already underway before Sandy hit, but it has been accelerated because it was quite clear post Sandy that the communities that voted to have dunes built were much better protected than the ones that aren't. But the problem with dunes is they are not permanent structures and they're expensive to build. And we're talking about, you know, communities in the east coast that benefit from these dunes, but the whole country pays for them. And so politically, that could become an increasing problem as they get more and more expensive and eventually becomes economically impossible to do it.
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B
John, climate change inevitably plays into this conversation. You said at the time that if Chris Christie gets the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he'll have Sandy to thank. But he hasn't exactly gone out of his way to talk about climate change and his success in Marshaling recovery funds from Obama for obvious reasons. Nor of course, have the 15 other candidates in the party, many of whom have said they don't even believe that global warming exists.
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C
All during Sandy and all during the recovery of Sandy. And I was actually at one of the press conferences right afterwards where he was asked about climate change and he just wouldn't answer the question. And you know, there were a lot of Republican governors up and down the east coast who have similar feelings about climate change. It's nice to see that at least within fema, there seems to have been in the last year policy statements which suggest a broad acceptance of of climate change. So there is some hope, but the governors are pretty retrograde. The Republican governors.
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B
Well. And is it right that this past march against Republican protest that FEMA required states plan for the effects of climate change or their share of annual funding for disaster preparedness programs will be cut?
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C
Right. That's one of the major sort of pro climate change things that FEMA has done recently, which really does suggest sort of a sea change within the agency. If you look at FEMA's response to Katrina and compare it to FEMA's response to Sandy, there really were a lot of changes within the management structure of fema. FEMA is now authorized in advance of a hurricane to go in and start doing what they do as opposed to having to wait for the governors of the states to invite them in. That's one huge change. Also, the way in which their programs are administered and the way the money gets from the the federal government to the affected homeowners has really been streamlined, much more so at least than in Katrina. So FEMA got pretty good marks after Sandy.
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So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
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B
You know, all of this, Katherine, has an interesting psychological dimension, which you also touched upon in your piece. You talked about the kind of human blindness and you called it temporal parochialism. Talk a little bit about that and how that plays into how we calculate risk.
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D
With earthquakes in particular, we're up against a really tricky timing problem. They are really the only absolutely unpredictable natural disaster of that scale. We can look at statistics of when these earthquakes have occurred in the past and make inferences from those, but there's no actual prediction or forecast system. And that turns out to be the kind of problem that we as a species are not very good at dealing with. It's very, very hard to figure out how to confront and proactively address a problem that we have really no lived experience of and no sense of when in the future it's going to occur. And there's a lot of things, I think, conspiring to keep the Northwest from really getting serious about seismic safety, but that's a huge one. Just the fact that the clock on which this fault line ticks is much slower than our human clock, and therefore we literally don't remember it. No one has a living memory of this earthquake. No one's parents or grandparents or great grandparents have it. And time turns out to be a hugely complicating factor in coping with risk.
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C
Yeah, that's all true. But there's also a large amount of denial, which I saw post Sandy. We had an apartment that was a block from the Hudson river that got six feet of water in the basement and the elevator was destroyed. And I said after that, I'm going to sell this place. You know, I said to the real estate agent, I don't know if anyone's going to want to buy it. And what if they ask, you know, about Sandy and what should we say about what happened and should we tell them the truth? And no one asked. So I think it's the country. We're still very much in a state of denial about what actually can happen when a natural disaster hits our waterfront towns. And Sandy was a wake up call, but maybe it's going to take one more before people finally say, okay, I don't want to live on the beach.
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B
Well, and Katherine out there, you write in the piece about schoolchildren who are Right in the line of where all of this would happen and the fact that they would be trapped, essentially. What precautions are being taken to be sure that there are proper evacuation routes and everything else?
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D
Well, not enough for sure. We've got schools in the tsunami inundation zone on the Oregon and Washington coast. We've got hospitals. We've got hazardous waste facilities. We've got energy facilities, old age homes. There's a lot of morally unconscionable things happening there. Also, outside of the inundation zone, we've got, you know, about 5,000 schools in the Pacific Northwest that are seismically unsound. Many of them are made of brick. They are effectively going to collapse and debouble on top of these children. There's not a lot of scientific dispute about that. And the real question is, in cases like that that are so morally stark, why isn't anything happening? I think John's right. There's of a lot, lot of denial out here, at least. There's also kind of the flip side of denial, which is fatalism. People do know it's going to happen. They're not disputing it. They just sort of feel like it's so huge and overwhelming that there's nothing to be done about it. To your question, there are a lot of very deeply committed people working incredibly hard at this issue. There certainly have been some strides made toward improving seismic safety here. Part of the problem is that we're talking about so much work to be done effectively. We've built an entire civilization on top of a very dangerous place fault line. And so we really are talking about rebuilding it. We're talking about the physical infrastructure, roads, highways, bridges, airports. We're talking about things like schools and hospitals. We're talking about, you know, every family in the region deciding to pony up the money to bolt down their homes and do similar things like that. On some level, it's not that much money. John, correct me if I misquote you, but I feel like the figure in that piece for how much we've spent to rebuild these beaches is something like $3.7 billion. Beaches are nice. I like beaches. Don't get me wrong. But you know what? You could seismically retrofit a whole lot of elementary schools for that amount of money, and we aren't doing it, John.
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B
We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Katrina, and Elizabeth Colbert wrote a piece for this magazine not so very long ago that the ravages of global warming go on. And so Louisiana, which is extremely low lying, you know, the U.S. army Corps of Engineers, I think, told Betsy that the rate at which the state's land is converting to water is probably the fastest in the world. And the between 1930 and 2000, 1.2 million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, just disappeared. So how much headway can we make.
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C
At least in terms of the Jersey Shore? We should never have built on the barrier islands. A lot of the Jersey Shore was developed during a relatively quiet time of hurricanes, which actually for a good deal of the 20th century was fairly quiet. And before anyone could really do anything about it, they were too valuable to remove. And that's kind of where we are right now. You know, at 3ft sea level rise, there's going to be, you know, sort of the less valuable structures that are going to say, okay, that's it, we're packing it in. But in the scenarios that I had in my piece, even with 6ft sea level rise in 2100, you've got the most valuable properties. This prediction was they're not going to want to leave, they're going to want to just do whatever is necessary to stay. And I think that's pretty much where we are and still are three years after Sandy. And I mean, everyone said, okay, it's a hundred year storm and they can live with that idea, but if it turns out that there's another one in 10 years or so, then I really feel like there will be an enormous change of thinking about whether the shore is inhabitable. I mean, people didn't live near the beach before the 1850s. It's not like human nature that we have to live next to the beach.
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B
And what about Louisiana? You talk about the strides that FEMA has made in emergency preparedness, but there we're talking about huge communities, many of them extremely poor. Are they ready to deal with what's coming? Inevitably, no.
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C
At least in New Jersey. Sure, the community is relatively wealthy. There's money to protect, and so there's money spent on protecting it. But when you're talking about the poor communities, how much will, how much political will, how much economic capital can you raise to do anything about that? And then it becomes a political problem and a racial inequality problem.
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D
It's funny in my head almost in the beginning, this story about the Cascadia Subduction zone was effectively a parable about climate change. I think John and I are talking about incredibly similar problems. We're talking about what do you do when you've built up an entire infrastructure and society in a way that leaves you profoundly vulnerable? To natural disasters. So to my mind, in a way, these are all the same story.
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B
Thank you both.
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D
Thank you so much.
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C
All right. Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Kathryn Schultz and John Seabrook are staff writers. This has been the political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts in the iTunes store. The weekly audio edition of the New Yorker is available@audible.com this podcast is produced by Jill Duboff and Alex Barron of.
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New Yorker.com.
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America is changing and so is the world.
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But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
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Hi, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.
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I'M Tristan Redman in London. And this is the Global story.
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Every weekday we'll bring you a story.
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From this intersection where the world and America meet.
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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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From. PRX.