NFPA Journal - November/December 2013 - (Page 16)

>>perspectives In her book, Kieffer, at left, speculates on the value of an international Center for Disaster Control, modeled on the Centers for Disease Control. A colleague of mine, a volcanologist, was instrumental in starting a program called Cities on Volcanoes, which holds meetings roughly every four years, typically in a town that's directly exposed to a volcanic hazard, like Quito, Ecuador. Scientists present research, but the events are really geared toward the local mayors, educators, and emergency responders as a practical effort to deal with public safety. I don't think that kind of organization would have existed 50 years ago. There's much more global awareness. Can groups like this serve as models for new efforts around the world? population. We now populate all inhabitable, and a lot of fairly uninhabitable, parts of the planet. And we're highly interconnected, so if something happens in one place, there tends to be a propagation of that event globally. We certainly see it with the possibility of pandemics. The United States is very rich in its ability to produce food, but not all areas of the world are. If we throw in some possible effects of natural disaster, like cooling after a volcanic eruption, it could stress the food supplies, for example. Which leads to other problems. That's right. A lot of unhealthy people, or people fighting over resources. What interests you as an earth scientist? I basically study things that move very fast, by geologic standards. I've studied explosive volcanism, meteorite impacts, big floods on the Colorado River, those sorts of things. The unifying theme is a particular type of fluid mechanics and mathematical physics, tools that I can apply to those processes. How has our overall approach to disasters changed during your career? The global connectivity we have now, compared to even a decade ago, is enormous. 16 NFPA JOURNAL NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013 I hope so. I lived through times when both Russia and China were closed societies-we simply could not access the science or scientists there. I was working at Mount St. Helens when it erupted in 1980, and very few of us knew that there had been an almost identical lateral blast in 1956 out of a volcano called Bezymianny in Russia. But it was in Kamchatka, near a lot of Russian submarine bases, and during the Cold War nobody could do field trips there to study it. The opening up of the world is, in general, a very good thing for dealing with disasters. Most of the events you write about are hard to predict. How does that affect preparedness? An example I talk about in the book is how California has developed its codes for earthquake preparation and mitigation. The thing that the earthquake people have to deal with is that all of their predictions are basically in statistics and probability. So they struggle with conveying to the public how important it is to prepare for an event that they can only describe in terms of the probability of its happening. And that's led to problems, especially in Italy. There are six seismologists on trial for manslaughter, because they were charged with failing to properly convey information to the public in advance of the L'Aquila earthquake in central Italy in 2009. They were convicted and handed jail terms and huge fines. It's in the appeals process now. I actually know one of the scientists involved, a very repu- Photographs: W. W. Norton & Company

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2013

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NFPA Journal - November/December 2013