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Reflections on Hurricanes and Other Unnatural Disasters by Jared Orsi, Professor of History, Colorado Sate University urtng the 1998 hurricane season I was in Chicago writing a book about the his- tory of natural disasters. I could not help but notice that what was obvious to me — that natural disasters have a good deal of human his- tory behind them —was anything but obvious to the wider public. As the Chicago Tribune edi- torialized, in the face of "nature's most violent displays of brute force," humans "can do little but watch in awe the 'great mischief of Mother Nature." Two years later, I was living in the tin- derbox known as the American West (the book was still not done), when the forests around Los Alamos, New Mexico, burst into flame after a controlled burn by the National Park Service didn't stay controlled. Instead of blaming nature this time, the papers wanted a hanging. "The Park Service should hold its personnel account- able," the Denver Post opined. "I find it hard to believe," fumed the Los Alamos congressional representative, "that no one is held accountable. Didn't someone make a mistake ?" As I write today, September 23, 2005, one of the worst hurricanes in history has just devastated the coastal regions of Louisiana and Mississippi, and another severe one is apparently bearing down on Texas's Gulf Coast. Yet again we seek answers: Nature's fury? God's wrath? Mal- feasance or at least incompetence on the part of responders —from emergency crews to the President of the United States? Although fingers point in many different directions, these expla- nations and the responses to the 1998 hurricanes and the Los Alamos fire share one thing: the assumption that something must go extremely wrong in order to produce an extreme tragedy. Nature must do something extraordinarily pow- erful, or human beings must make extraordinary mistakes. Although seemingly logical and very understandable given the scale of tragedy that results from natural disasters, this assumption is not borne out by historical evidence. It does not take a big and bad cause to produce a big and bad effect. In the case of Los Alamos, the fire was caused by a complex of unfortunate but unremarkable mistakes and coincidences: the accumulation of ground fuel in the 1990s, the pending retirement of a park superintendent who favored use of fire as a tool in forest management, a drought that portended a bad fire season. All of these ordi- nary things conspired to add urgency in officials mind for the need for a burn in the spring of 2000. But there was more: an out of date protocol for prescribed burning that had been mistakenly posted on the internet, small mistakes in the ad- mittedly imprecise science —no, guess work —that goes into estimating fire safety conditions. And then there was the big mistake that came from the invisible problem of combining the wrong protocol with the small errors in the fire safety rating. Add to this a National Weather Service report that never got to park service officials. All of these conspired to lead officials to pick a very bad day for the fire. Finally there was the chaotic patterns of blowing wind and burning flames. Neither predictable, neither controllable. From all these small, ordinary system failures —fail- ures that can happen on any given day without any severe consequences —came a billion -dollar tragedy. The Secretary of the Interior Bruce Bab- bitt likened it to a series of stones loosened from a mountainside. "Sometimes," he said, "a rock is dislodged and nothing happens, but other times a rock is dislodged and it starts a cascading series of events... [until] you have a landslide at the bot- tom." Hurricanes work similarly, though on a much larger scale. First, human beings with short memories and big plans for the future put a lot of stuff in harms way in the twentieth century. South Florida, for example, enjoyed three decades between Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and during that time, popula- tion and property values skyrocketed. This pat- tern has repeated across the country and around the globe, with the consequence that the severity and frequency of natural disasters has increased steadily since the 1970s. The worldwide price tag 2 l