The flooding disaster in Central Texas has been heart breaking. I can not imagine the pain of loosing a family member in a tragedy like this. It has made me consider (again) how our society thinks about disasters and how we allocate our resources.

In the calm before a disaster, we generally underestimate our disaster risk.  This leads to decisions to invest our limited resources to tackle more obvious and visible challenges. Educating our kids. Fixing potholes. Providing drinking water to our communities. Providing healthcare.  Funding police and fire fighters. Enhancing mobility.  These investments foster vibrant economic and social conditions.

But disasters of all types occur repeatedly.  When an earthquake, flood, hurricane, wildfire, or tsunami strikes, property is often damaged, injuries frequently occur, and deaths sometimes result.  We send thoughts and prayers, and we argue over who’s to blame and what went wrong.  Elected leaders make disaster declarations, state and federal funding arrives, and response, recovery, and repair operations are initiated. 

We know how to reduce disaster risks and we know how much these investments will cost, but we choose not to make those investments for a variety of valid reasons.

Consider the automobile. 

Tragically, automobile crashes in the United States kill 40,000 people each year on average.  We could equip all existing vehicles and new vehicles with a device that would prevent them from traveling more than 5 miles per hour (mph).  This would likely eliminate all deaths; however, economic and social activity would be diminished.  Most of us would be unlikely to agree to a 5-mph speed limit in exchange for a reduced death toll.  Those who have lost a loved one to a car crash would be more likely to support adding some kind of speed limiter device.

It’s the same with natural disasters. Consider riverine flooding. 

Riverine flooding in the United States causes extensive property damage and loss of life each year.  We could relocate all existing structures along bayous, creeks, and rivers to be outside of flood zones.  We could build new structures away from the water’s edge and above flood levels. We could build new buildings near streams to withstand flood waters. We could deploy warning systems such as alarms or text messaging systems.  These actions would reduce property damage, injuries, and deaths; however, economic and social activity would be diminished.

Most of us would be unlikely to agree to all these risk reduction actions because relocation costs would be high, private property rights would be infringed upon, and water-based recreation would be curtailed.  If we received additional notifications during time with family and friends or while sleeping, we might dismiss them or switch them off.

In the immediate aftermath of disaster, we prioritize resilience and risk reduction investments for a time; however, that fades, and we shift our attention and our funding to tackling the more obvious and visible challenges mentioned above.

We collectively make resource allocation decisions all the time.  While this seems to minimize the profound impact of disasters on individuals and families, we choose to accept some disaster losses in exchange for enhanced social and economic activity.  Of course, this does not diminish the pain and sadness of those who have lost friends and family in disasters, but it appears to be true.

Perhaps, with a slight shift in thinking, we could allocate a bit more resources towards risk reduction, without harming our economic and social well-being.

But we have to collectively decide to do that.