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Many of us who live in the rest of the country might marvel at the tenacity of Floridians who weather hurricane season year after year, but the truth is a large percentage of the population lives at risk of one kind of a natural disaster or another. And more of us probably wish we did. The riskiest places just happen to be some of the most beautiful: the banks of the babbling brook which occasionally floods; the fringes of the forest, which sometimes catches fire. The question is, who bears the burden of the risk of living in one of these beautiful but perhaps perilous places? web site beaches in florida
With us now is Dennis Mileti, retired director of the Natural Hazard Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado and the author of “Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States.” He joins us from the studios of KPSI in Palm Springs.
Welcome to the show.
Dr. DENNIS MILETI (Author, “Disasters by Design”): Thank you very much.
PALCA: So we just heard a discussion about the destruction in Florida. Why do people there keep building in such a risky area? And maybe the answer is simple as it’s nice to live there most of the time.
Dr. MILETI: Well, that’s certainly, I’m sure, one of the reasons people go to Florida. But in general, the real answer is, they’re human beings. And human beings are wired in a particular way that has them discount low-probability, high-consequence events like hurricanes. We really, as a general rule, don’t take those sorts of extremes into account when we make decisions about where to live.
PALCA: Well, but actually, since you bring it up, I mean, there’s a lot of people who are terrified of flying, even though that’s a low-probability, high-risk event. And some of them can’t even bring themselves to get onto airplanes.
Dr. MILETI: That’s right. And the psychologists have a name for that, and it’s in the category of diseases.
PALCA: Aha. OK. So you’re saying that if you’re so obsessed with the concern that something bad will happen, it’s not a normal state? this web site beaches in florida
Dr. MILETI: Psychologists say that. I’m a sociologist, so I’ll let them have that categorization.
PALCA: OK.
Dr. MILETI: But in general, yes.
PALCA: All right. So, you know, I mean, but right afterwards, certainly the memory must be painfully clear for people in Florida, and they can’t have discounted it so much to start banging a nail into a board and rebuilding a house. So do they just say, `Well, I’ll just forget about it’?
Dr. MILETI: How most people process information about risk is, after an event, if you’re a member of the public, it’s a much more salient issue than it was before the event. But the salience of it decays and decays quickly. If there isn’t another hurricane in Florida and we did some polls over time, we’d probably find out that in two years, most people’s degree of concern about the hurricane hazard would be back to where it was a few months ago.
PALCA: So whose responsibility is it to help people rebuild? Should people have to take this upon themselves and acknowledge, you know, whether they do it psychologically or just economically, that they live in a high-risk area and it’s going to cost them a lot of money from time to time to repair the damage?
Dr. MILETI: Well, our federal government has always come to the aid of disaster victims and provided that which needed to be provided to put lives back together. So by choice, our society as a whole helps people who need help from natural disasters.
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