Disasters: A Wander down Memory Lane

Citation

Korstanje, M.E. (2013), "Disasters: A Wander down Memory Lane", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 250-252. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-07-2012-0022

The effects of global warming not only are changing the world and local economies, but also the way experts designs their policies to mitigate natural disasters. With this in mind, the book, which is authored by A. Dasgupta, provides readers with an all‐encompassed view respecting to the adaptancy to greenhouse effects. The worse disasters, global warming aggravates, is misery and poverty. Therefore, it represents the biggest threat humankind will face in next years. This assumption prompted author to rewrite this book in a new and better version published in 2011. Some chapters have been retired and others added. As a traveller and scientist, Dasgupta argues that the ever‐growing possibilities to forecast disasters facilitate to implement planning and policies not only in contexts of rescue but also in absorbing the negative effects of floods, quakes and other types of disasters.

Basically, a disaster is a violent event that produces a great devastation in communities. Disasters are described and examined by the whole of mythologies across the world. Combining practical suggestions with personal experiences, the diverse chapters where this book is structured analyze one by one how each disaster may be treated. The nature of an earthquake surely is different to a flood and vice‐versa. As the previous argument given, Dasgupta recognizes that one of the most troubling aspects of disasters seem to be the recovery process. The aftershock impacts post disasters not only are very hard to forget but also the affected people is circumscribed to live temporarily, sometimes for years, in emergency housings until the reconstruction ends. Additionally, psychological problems such as trauma, alcoholism, drugs abuse, sleeping disorders, and familiar disaggregation are common in post disaster communities. Depending on the damage on the hospitals, roads and heath systems, survivors who need medical attention are in serious risk. Disasters, as states of emergencies, appeal to the infrastructure built by the man.

Undoubtedly, many countries have recently adopted tourism to improve their productive conditions. This was the case of Sri Lanka where many Western tourists fly to enjoy of their landscapes, sun and beaches. These types of infrastructures are often dysfunctional to the suggested architecture in case of catastrophes. Tourism seems to be, as explained, an activity that somehow increase the vulnerability of community. Based on the last Tsunami in Sri Lanka, Dasgupta says:

[…] at the outset, nobody realised the extent of its devastation, but when the waves receded, the magnitude of the tragedy was revealed. Over 235.000 people were dead, over one and half million people were homeless, and many people, including a number of tourists, were found to be missing. The full extent of death from the Tsunami may never be known. Children were most tragic victims, and one‐third of the dead appeared to be children (p. 13).

Other secondary effects as diarrhoea, typhoid, and malaria were particularly dangerous for survivors. What should be the lesson this event leave?

Whenever the societies articulate efforts to conduct a system of alert, these types of events may be avoided. Technology plays a crucial role in preventing disasters. The design of disasters allows saving lives, and for that, the state should invest considerable money, efforts and time training good specialists and policy makers. This book certainly represents a vivid and erudite compilation of the worse disasters, Dasgupta faced in his job. As a travelling medical doctor, Dasgupta's experience accumulated all these years visiting destroyed sites throughout the world, is structured in 14 well written chapters. The last one, as already stated, is fully dedicated to the convergence of technology, global warming and disasters. In sum, one might find in Disasters, a recommendable work for disaster regular readers.

What is important to discuss here, is not only the role of a doctor, as a travelling actor who are familiar with human suffering, unlike the tourist whose vulnerability is equalled to its indifference by other's pain, but also the clarification on how technology works in our modern world. At a first glance, the book of Dasgupta does not examine properly the paradox of global warming and technology. While global warming aftermaths does indeed concern a whole audience, less practical steps are followed by the nations. Paradoxically, gases emitted to the atmosphere, far away of being reduced, are annually duplicated. The individual steps of nations are not enough to set back the contamination. This reminds two things, first and foremost, the problem of global warming is very difficult to resolve. The global warming paradox is a product of capitalism and its penchant to commoditize disasters in forms of mediated products (theatralization). The fictionalization of disasters, daily broadcasted by the mass‐media, affects seriously the capacity of resiliency of a community, transforming a slippery matter in a cultural entertainment.

Second, technology not always makes our life safer. Given this, the intervention on the risky factors that are considered a danger, may engender some unconsidered risks. The design of risk is facing a lot of critiques respecting to the role of technology, after Chernobyl's accident. As a social construe, risk is only possible in the future. It never existed as a fact. The quandary is explained in the following terms. If any risk is not properly regulated, the society may come across with a state of emergency. Nevertheless, this idea is hypothetical, and under some conditions these types of interventions, which stand in future setting, create a disaster in the present. This means not only that the future is not determined but the sense of safety is very hard to grasp. For example, interesting ethnographies revealed how aborigines distrust from the Western technologies and machines introduced by researchers to measure the seismographic activities in view of any potential quake; rejecting the possibility to get away their homes aborigines believed that Westerners were the responsible for the earthquake, because they provoked the God's rage. Unfortunately, the number of victims reminds that the efforts of professionals to re‐channel the evacuation was not only useless, but counter‐productive, and results are as tragic as they would not have done anything (Korstanje, 2010); cross cultural research, in this case, should be expanded. Although this point, superfluous examined in this book, is of paramount importance in the studies of disasters, remains unexplored by the specialized literature. This begs an interesting question, is risk a result of modernity?, why risk is more important for Anglo‐societies than other cultures?, is global warming a real threat for us?, is the risk a result of secularization process?