Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Disaster by Design

Dennis S. Mileti, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and
Director of the Natural Hazards Research Applications and Information Center
University of Colorado at Boulder

Tuesday, March 27, 2001, at 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

The cost of natural hazards and disasters is going up and is expected to keep rising. Since 1989, natural hazards in the United States--including floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires--have frequently cost an average of $1 billion per week. Moreover, the very largest natural catastrophes are getting worse and will continue to get larger because, among other reasons, of everything in the past that has been done to reduce risk. For example, building a dam or levee may protect a community from the small- and medium-sized floods the structure was designed to handle. But additional development that occurs because of this protection will mean even greater losses during a big flood that causes the dam or levee to fail. Such incidents occurred during the 1993 flooding in the Mississippi River basin.

A central problem is that many of the accepted methods for coping with hazards have been based on the idea that people can use technology to control nature's "problems" and make themselves totally safe. However, it is misleading to think of natural hazards as problems because problems mean there are solutions. The more basic issue is how communities engage in non-sustainable development that increases what there is to loose in large natural disasters.

A central problem is that many of the accepted methods for coping with hazards have been based on the idea that people can use technology to control nature's "problems" and make themselves totally safe. However, it is misleading to think of natural hazards as problems because problems mean there are solutions. The more basic issue is how communities engage in non-sustainable development that increases what there is to loose in large natural disasters.

While actions taken to mitigate disasters, such as building codes that require buildings to withstand certain magnitudes of earthquakes, save lives and dollars in the short term, it also means that hazards losses are being shifted to future generations. Consequently, there is a need to change the nation's culture such that people design communities for the long term. Local officials might better "design future disasters" for their communities, actually setting the number of deaths, injuries and dollar losses they are willing to accept-and be responsible for-as the result of the most extreme disasters their community could face during the next 50 or 100 years.

While actions taken to mitigate disasters, such as building codes that require buildings to withstand certain magnitudes of earthquakes, save lives and dollars in the short term, it also means that hazards losses are being shifted to future generations. Consequently, there is a need to change the nation's culture such that people design communities for the long term. Local officials might better "design future disasters" for their communities, actually setting the number of deaths, injuries and dollar losses they are willing to accept-and be responsible for-as the result of the most extreme disasters their community could face during the next 50 or 100 years.

Until people are ready to address the interdependent root causes of disasters and to do the difficult work of coming to a negotiated consensus about which losses are acceptable, which are unacceptable, and what type of action to take today that are consistent with those future acceptable losses, the nation's communities will continue on a path toward ever-larger natural catastrophes.

About the Speaker

Dennis Mileti is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Natural Hazards Research Applications and Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Colorado in 1974; his master's degree in sociology was awarded in 1971 from California State University at Los Angeles; and he earned his bachelor's degree in sociology in 1968 from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Professor Mileti is the author of over 100 publications. Most of these focus on the societal aspects of mitigation and preparedness for natural hazards and disasters. He has served on a various of advisory boards, for example, as Chairman of the Committee on Natural Disasters in the National Research Council, as a member of the Advisory Board on Research of the Geological Survey and as Chair of the Board of Visitors to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Emergency Management Institute. He is currently a member of the Advisory Board at the Southern California Earthquake Center, the Mid America Earthquake Engineering Center, the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, and he is a member of the multi-hazard Mitigation Council. He is the co-founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Natural Hazards Review, which is an interdisciplinary all-hazards journal devoted to bringing together the natural and social sciences, engineering, and the policy communities.

Professor Mileti recently completed a 5-year long national effort that involved over 130 experts to assess knowledge, research, and policy needs for natural and related technological hazards in the U.S. The summary of this work was published in 1999 as a book titled Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States.