Five questions for Kathleen Tierney
Kathleen Tierney
Photo by the University of ColoradoKathleen Tierney
Disasters are as unpredictable as they are inevitable. Somewhere around the world, people are preparing for, experiencing or recovering from a disaster, and Kathleen Tierney never knows exactly what she'll be up against when she wakes up every morning.
Tierney is the director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, which works to strengthen communication and knowledge for those involved with hazards, disasters and risks.
She began training as a disaster researcher when she was a doctoral student at Ohio State University. At the same time, Tierney was interested in how groups, organizations and social systems responded and adapted when they were disrupted.
Currently she shares such knowledge as a professor in the department of sociology with a joint appointment in the Institutes of Behavioral Sciences. This semester, she's appropriately teaching a course titled "Hazards, Disasters and Society," where students are engaged in a real-time examination of the most recent world disaster in Japan.
In an effort to encourage the public's understanding of hazards and disasters, Tierney also serves as a media expert, clarifying mayhem and events as they happen.
— Cynthia Pasquale
1. What are the goals of the Natural Hazards Center?
We have three main goals.
The first is to serve as a clearing house and information source on the societal dimensions of hazards, disasters and risks. We produce a lot of different kinds of information products and engage in a lot of outreach beyond the university, including with decision-makers and professionals involved in disaster loss reduction. We also serve as a hub for people looking for information and contacts regarding all different kinds of hazards and social science topics around those hazards. We maintain our website, provide links to other sources of information, produce newsletters – including theNatural Hazards Observer – and bring together people from all over the world who are interested in disasters and hazards for a workshop each July.
Second, we conduct our own research on hazards and disaster-related topics. At any given time, we have a number of research projects going on. We are looking at decision-making and early planning around the provision of temporary housing in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. We're participating with other collaborators on a project studying the impact of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill on the social fabric of affected communities. One researcher is wrapping up a study in Ukraine on the long-term physical and psychological impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Another researcher is looking at the impacts of a coal ash spill in Tennessee on quality of life and community solidarity. We're also working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), studying early warning systems for flash floods and hurricanes.
Our third goal is to train other researchers, so we employ graduate students on our research projects.
2. Japan was prepared for disaster, but it seems no one expected the magnitude of the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami and nuclear disaster. Has this changed the thinking about preparedness?
Japan did expect a disaster like this. They have been preparing for 30 years for a disaster called the Great Tokai earthquake that would have been on a fault closer to Tokyo and caused a large tsunami with massive impacts beyond what we have seen.
A recent story from Reuters said one engineer in particular who worked for Tokyo Electric Power wrote scientific papers saying that a large tsunami could be expected at the Fukushima plant. So to say it wasn't expected is incorrect. This is similar to what President Bush said after Katrina. He famously said that no one could have anticipated that the levees would collapse. That was not true. It was widely anticipated that the levees would collapse.
What Japan did not expect was this particular earthquake at this particular time. And it was the magnitude, the timing and location of the tsunami.
The United States has been planning for hurricanes for a very long time, but the U.S. was overwhelmed by Katrina. This is not only Japan's Katrina, but it's happening in a country with the land mass of California. This is their Katrina and their Three Mile Island all at once. It is a catastrophe and societies are not very good at handling catastrophes. Most developed countries haven't had that much experience with catastrophes. The United States has only had four in its entire history: the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River floods, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Japan's catastrophes were the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, World War II and now this.
3. Can the U.S. and world ever be totally prepared for disasters?
When you're talking about a real disaster, to be prepared, one of the best things we can do is mitigate damage in the first place by having appropriate kinds of land use and urban planning practices by adopting the right kinds of codes and enforcing the codes to prevent damage. And to prepare the public and businesses and households so they know how to respond well.
We can do all these things to prepare, but every disaster brings unexpected things and surprises. One of the secrets of being prepared is to be able to improvise and innovate when things happen that are unexpected.
Catastrophes are very different, however. We don't work hard enough on catastrophic planning and worst-case planning and neither did Japan. The past is not a predictor of the future in terms of disasters. Because we've only had four so far doesn't mean we'll be able to go another 40 years, because vulnerability and risk are changing all the time.
We have to get better at planning what the worst could look like and we have to face it. We can't pretend that the worst can't happen. There needs to be a cultural ability – whether you're talking about the culture of organizations or the culture of the government – to face the worst. And we've got to have a very clear, frank and transparent discussion of what we're going to do to prepare for the worst.
The Reuters story is an example. People at Tokyo Power were writing about a tsunami that could be 14 feet high (the actual height was 20 feet) and management knew about it, but what did management do? Nothing.
If we're going to contemplate the worst, let's at least hear from our leaders what they're doing about it. In New Orleans, they've said that we're not going to build the levees back to be strong enough to withstand a Category 5 hurricane because it's too expensive. The American Society of Civil Engineers said New Orleans is still quite unsafe. So now we know.
4. What would you consider your greatest achievement or favorite work to date?
I'm most proud of two things. One is my students and the other people I've mentored over my career. I'm most proud of their accomplishments. And I'm extremely proud of the role the Hazards Center has played as a leader in the field both in the United States and the world.
5. Why do you like this work?
This is going to sound horrible to say, but it's the variety and the sheer excitement and novelty. Literally, when you get up in the morning you don't know what you are going to be doing. In our globalized world, disasters that happen anywhere affect our work.
Spring semester of last year, I was also teaching "Hazards, Disasters and Society," and on the first day of class, which happened to be Jan. 12, I told my students that at any given time during the course there might be a major disaster that we would have to look at and talk about. That evening was the Haiti earthquake. So we started the course with the Haiti earthquake and finished it with the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.