Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - That Turn To Pascagoula

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable - but when a hurricane came close to destroying the city, the reaction was muted. Some people took the near miss as a warning - others, as confirmation that there was nothing to worry about.So why do we struggle to prepare for disasters? And why don't we draw the obvious lessons from clear warnings?Sources for this episode include Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness, and Predictable Surprises by Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins. For a full list of sources see http://timharford.com/Tim's latest books 'Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy' and 'The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy' are available now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin We could have seen it coming. We really could. For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable. The Houston Chronicle reported that if a major hurricane struck 250,000 people would be stranded in the low-lying city, their homes underwater. A local emergency management director told the newspaper, I don't even want to think about the loss of life a huge hurricane would cause. That's understandable. It's also part of the problem.

The Houston Chronicle wasn't the only newspaper to examine the risks. The New Orleans Times Pick a Un published a five-part series, opening with, It's only a matter of time before South Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. They added that the levees, the last line of defence, might not be strong enough. Much of New Orleans lies below sea level. Some of the levees were in poor repair. The risk of a levee failure was obvious. National Geographic vividly described a scenario in which 50,000 people drowned.

The Red Cross feared a similar death toll. Even FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was alert. In 2001, it had stated that a major hurricane hitting your le Orleans was one of the three the lightliest catastrophes facing the United States. So, yes, we could have seen it coming. And now the disaster scenario was becoming a reality. A 400 mile an hour Hurrican was heading directly towards the city. More than a million residents were warned to evacuate.

USA Today warned of a modern Atlantis. The newspaper explained that the hurricane could overwhelm your leans with up to 20 feet of filthy chemical polluted water. The city's mayor, Ray Nagan, begged people to get away. He was reluctant to make evacuation mandatory because around 100,000 people had no cars, and no way of leaving. The roads out were jammed anyway, it took 10 or 12 hours just to get out of Baton Rouge

only 80 miles away. Thousands of visiting conference delegates were stranded, the airport had been closed, there weren't enough emergency shelters. Nagan suggested using a local stadium, the Louisiana Superdome, as a temporary refuge, but the Superdome wasn't necessarily hurricane proof, and Nagan was warned that it wasn't equipped to be a shelter. But then, the storm turned aside. The hurricane's name was not Katrina. It was Hurricane Ivan.

It was September 2004 and New Orleans had been spared and Hurricane Ivan had provided the city and the nation with a vivid warning. I'm Tim Harford and you are listening to Corsionary Tales. In 2003, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled, Predictable Surprises, The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming. The authors, Max Baseman and Michael Watkins, are both business school professors and they followed up with a book, also called, Predictible Surprises. Baseman and Watkins argued that while the world is an unpredictable place, unpredictability is often not the problem. The problem is that even when we're faced with clear risks, we still failed to act.

Hurricane Katrina, looming over New Orleans, was one of those clear risks. The near miss of Hurricane Ivan had demonstrated the need to prepare, urgently and on a dozen different fronts for the next hurricane, but the authorities did not act swiftly or decisively enough. Eleven months after Ivan, Katrina drowned the city and hundreds of its residents. As predicted, many tens of thousands of citizens had been unable or unwilling to evacuate. As predicted, levees had been breached in many places. As predicted, the superdome had been an inadequate shelter. Surely, with such a clear warning, New Orleans should have been better prepared to withstand Hurricane Katrina. It's easily said. But look at how the new coronavirus swept the globe, killing thousands every day

and driving us into economically devastating lockdowns. Your leans isn't the only place that didn't prepare for a predictable catastrophe. It's not like pandemics are a new issue, after all, Michael Watkins' author of Predictable Surprises sent me over the notes for a pandemic response exercise that he ran at Harvard University. I've got it right here. The exercise begins with this scenario. One week after four classes begin, five students who just returned from a trip to South and Africa become very ill. One subsequently dies, throwing the student body into turmoil. Ariel, one subsequently dies, throwing the student body into turmoil. After a lull, significant numbers of new cases emerge, signaling the beginning of an outbreak in the university and the broader community.

It's supposed to be a role-playing exercise for business school students, and in the exercise, things soon get worse. Rumors spread, people socially distance, classes move online, that the date on the document is the 12th of October, 2002. We've been thinking about pandemics for a long time. Not just in business school exercises either, what about Bill Gates' 2015 TED Talk titled, The Next Outbreak, We're Not Ready. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Bill Gates, he's not exactly a marginal figure, is he? I have friends at Ted, and I called them to ask how many people watched the talk, before

this year began, before it suddenly became so newsworthy. They told me, 2.5 million people, that is a lot of people, who at least saw the memo. Officialdom had also been sounding the alarm. The World Health Organization and the World Bank had convened the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. In October last year, they published a report calling for better preparation for, managing the fallout of a high-impact respiratory pathogen. A high-impact respiratory pathogen was a risk who knew, well the global preparedness monitoring

board knew it seems, and alongside these authoritative warnings were the near misses, the pandemic versions of Hurricane Ivan. In the last 20 years, SARS, H5N1, H1N1, Ebola, MERS, each deadly outbreak sparked grief and justifiable alarm, followed by a collective shrug of the shoulders. We were warned, both by the experts and by reality, yet on most fronts, we were still caught unprepared. Why? Let's meet mere Patrick Turner, a citizen of New Orleans, a veteran of the Second World War. When Hurricane Ivan bore down on the city, Turner was 84 years old. His family heated

the mayor's warning, they prepared to evacuate to Austin, Texas. That's 500 miles. Turner was reluctant to go. He'd seen a lot of hurricanes just miss new Orleans. The storms always make that turn to Pascagula, you would say, referring to the city a 100 miles down the coast, but Turner's family insisted he evacuated, so he squeezed himself into the crowded car. Remember how bad the traffic was, how people were driving from dawn till dusk just to cover the first 80 miles out of New Orleans? It was a nightmare-ish journey for an old man.

And Hurricane Ivan made the turn to Pascagula, just like storms always did. Well, almost always. Turner had experience to hurricane breaching the levees in New Orleans once before, but that was nearly four decades earlier, and when Turner's family told the story, what they remembered most was a stray cat. The frightened feline had ducked under the skirting around the outside of the Turner's house and was now penned under their floorboards by the high waters, they could hear it plaintively muing. Patrick Turner wasn't about to spend the next week listening to the cat whimper for help as it starved. His daughter, Sheila, told a tale to the writer Amanda Ripley of how

all of them crawled around on the floor trying to figure out where the cat was. They figured it was of all places under the washing machine. So, Sheila's dad moved the machine and sawed a cartoon-like circle in the wooden floor to see the cat spring up to safety. That was Mr Turner, practical. Now it was 2005. Hurricane Katrina was heading remorselously towards the city. A local weatherman's cheerful demeanor cracked and he he told his viewers, "'May God be with you.'" Patrick Turner's family once again begged the old man to evacuate with them, but this time he was in no mood to listen. He was 85 years old, a widower, living alone, and anyway, the storms always make that turn to Pascagula, and so Mr Turner told his children, I'm not going. His daughter Sheila reminded him about the hurricane-led weathered 40 years ago.

Yes, yes dad, forget the cat. Think about the tens of thousands of homes that flooded. Think about the dozens of people who were killed. Remember those poor souls who were trapped in their own attics by the rising water? Stories still circulating your leans of the claw marks they left as they tried to get out. No, said old Mr. Turner. I listened to you last year, and I was stuck in your damned car for hours on end. I'm staying. She looked kept trying, so did his other children.

He got so tired of the calls that he took the phone off the hook. Many others felt similarly. Not most, by any means, 80% of the population of New Orleans decided to evacuate. It's commonly assumed that the people who stayed simply couldn't get out, but when night-ridden newspapers investigated after the storm, they found that those who died weren't disproportionately poor or black. Some people were just stuck, of course, but many others weighed up the risks. Thought about the agonies of evacuating, remembered Hurricane Ivan and decided that things would

be okay if they toughed it out. For many people, Hurricane Ivan wasn't viewed as a warning of how bad things could get, it was viewed as yet another false alarm. Of course, it wasn't. Patrick Turner was trapped by the rising water, just like the cat hid rescued 40 years before, but there was nobody to rescue him, and the New Orleans Fire Department only managed to reach him two weeks later. He was dead, apparently, of a heart attack.

The devoted family man had died alone in his attic, because this storm didn't make that turn to Pascagula. The appearance of SARS in late 2002 should have been a warning to us all. SARS is deadly, considerably more dangerous than COVID-19, but fortunately it proved easier to contain. Several thousand people caught it, several hundred people died, and the economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan took a pounding. The economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan took a pounding. For them, SARS wasn't a near-miss. It was a painful hit. And many of those countries took note, investing in public health infrastructure and preparing

for the next pandemic. For most of the rest of us, however, SARS was more like Hurricane Ivan. All that fast. And in the end it was fine. Instead of concluding, that was a close thing, we're better prepared. We concluded, the Doommongers are always giving us disaster scenarios, and it's never as bad as they say. The same with MERS, the same in 2009 with H1N1, sometimes called Swine Flu. Swine Flu was the first time the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern.

People were really worried about Swine Flu, but in retrospect it seems to have been quite similar to the seasonal flu that hits us every year, which kills a few hundred thousand people around the globe, but doesn't change our way of life. Rosalind Bachelot could tell you all about H1N1. She was the French health minister at the time of the outbreak, and she took it seriously. She stocked up on masks, she ordered 94 million doses of flu vaccine. She did, everything we now complain our leaders didn't do. And in the end, Swine flu took that turn to Pascagula. It didn't kill tens of millions of people. Did the French public and media congratulate Rosalind Bachelot for her sensible precaution?

They did not. They looked at how much public money should spend on masks and vaccines, some €400 million about half a billion dollars, and they blamed her for it. Two years later, a new governor of California took office after a brutal recession. Jerry Brown started to look for ways to save public money, and he elated on an expensive stockpile of medical supplies maintained by his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Arnie had spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating mobile hospitals that emergency responders could use to deal with earthquakes, fires and, yes, pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, the stockpile included 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed. It's impressive, but that stockpile is now nowhere to be found. When Jerry Brown cut funding for the scheme, did voters howl with protest?

Did they make clear they wanted their scarce tax dollars devoted to sensible preparedness? They did not. Politicians have other priorities, because we have other priorities. We voters don't take kindly to those who spend our taxes preparing for disasters that may never happen. And the near misses? All too often, the near misses only make things worse. Less than four years ago, my own country, the UK, ran a pandemic planning scenario dubbed Exercise Signus.

It sounds like an awesome piece of forethought, but it doesn't seem to have helped the country to prepare for COVID-19. It might even have made it harder. Why? The problem was that Exercise Signus was about preparing for a dangerous flu outbreak, but coronavirus is not the flu. The government had learned some very specific lessons that they had to painfully unlearn as the unusual features of COVID-19 became apparent.

That's a problem with many predictable surprises. They're only predictable in a general sort of way, the details aren't predictable at all. Hurricanes in New Orleans should be among the easiest disasters to prepare for, it's pretty clear what will help, strengthening levees, installing pumps, and it's a scandal that those things weren't done before Katrina hit. But in other cases, even though the general shape of the risk is clear, false alarms are going off all the time, and the exact problem cannot be predicted.

Well, how then are we to prepare? We need to think bigger. It's impossible to prepare for every eventuality, but the next best thing is a massive, all-purpose resilience that comes from having plenty of spare capacity in everything. The British government should have learned from exercise sickness that it would have been a good idea to have a stockpile of things that would probably be useful in any kind of pandemic, such as gowns, visors, or swabs. They didn't.

That's hard to forgive. But it's depressingly easy to understand. It's the same reasoning that led Jerry Brown to dismantle Arnold Schwarzenegger's sensible stockpile. All purpose resilience tends to look wasteful, right, up until the point at which you desperately need it. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, I spoke with a friend of mine, a senior physician. At the time he was recovering from the disease himself, he had contracted it while tending to his patients.

He reminisced about a day in early March, when the writing should have been on the wall. Italians had started to die in alarming numbers, and his hospital made an announcement. They would no longer be providing coffee for staff meetings. If the coffee budget had been diverted to stockpiling masks and gowns, that would be impressive. But who are we kidding? They were simply trying to save money whenever they could. Organisations that won't pay for coffee, won't pay for resilience, either. After Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans, installed new pumps.

They were supposed to be strong enough to protect the city for 50 years, but as Margaret Heffanon describes in her book Willful Blindness, the pumps weren't fit for the job. One whistleblower, the US Army Corps engineer Maria Gazzino, told Heffanon, the pumping systems fell apart each time we turned them on, they blow their guts out. Eventually the final tests were just cancelled. Instead, the policy had become, hope for the best. Gazzino complained and complained and was repeatedly brushed off. Finally an independent report concluded she'd been right, the job had been botched, costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the summer of 2017, New Orleans was under water again. The pumps were failing, under supplied with power and unable to cope with several weeks of persistent rain. It does not inspire confidence for what will happen if another Katrina strikes. But there is one more warning that New Orleans offers the rest of us. Robert Mayer, the co-author of the Austrich paradox, says preparing for another hurricane Katrina, might not be enough. Katrina wasn't even close to being the worst case scenario for New Orleans, he told me. That would be a full, category

five storm hitting just east of the city. The same may be true of the pandemic, because COVID-19 has spread much faster than HIV and is more dangerous than the flu, it's easy to imagine that this is as bad as it could possibly get. It isn't. Perhaps this pandemic is a challenge that should be teaching us to think about other dangers, from bioterrorism to climate change, or perhaps the next threat really is a perfectly predictable surprise, another virus, just like this one, but worse. Imagine an illness as contagious as measles and as virulent as

Ebola. Imagine a disease that disproportionately kills children rather than the elderly. What if we're thinking about this the wrong way? What see COVID-19 itself as the warning. Next time, we'll be better prepared. To tell this story, we drew on The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, the ostrich paradox by Howard Conroyther and Robert Meyer and Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffanon. As always a full list of our stories is available in the show notes on timhalford.com. This cautionary tale was written and presented by me, Tim Halford, with help from Andrew Wright.

The show was produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Marilyn Rust. The music, mixing and sound design, other work of Pascal Weise. The scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mia Label, Carly Milliori, Heather Fein, Maya Canig, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. pushkin industry's production. you