Thinking the Unthinkable

Today I am “thinking out loud” as I watch, read, and listen to what is happening on the Gulf Coast – I am really concerned about what is happening there, and I thank you for listening as I share my thoughts and note these are my thoughts and not necessarily those of the CARRI Team.  A couple of years ago, Time magazine reporter Amanda Ripley published a book titled The Unthinkable: Who survives when disaster strikes and why. The book recounts individual acts of heroism in response to disasters and what bluntly must be described as incredible acts of naïveté at best and stupidity at worst. It is simplistic, but accurate, to say that those who survive disasters think ahead and those who do not, don’t.

Of course it is human nature to resist thinking about disasters, unthinkable or otherwise. We will never know why some people try to carry their luggage off a burning plane, why someone heads for their attic with no way out during a severe flood or why some thought up was the best way to get out of the burning World Trade Center.

CARRI is about encouraging communities to think about known possible threats that have a reasonable possibility of occurring. Addressing these through mitigation, preparation, response and planning to recover makes common sense.

But CARRI is also encouraging communities to think about the unthinkable where the consequences of a disaster can be dramatic in scale. The way we have been doing this is developing a Common Framework that asks communities to look at events, no matter how remote, where the potential loss is enormous. In doing this, they may decide that at least some preparation or mitigation – however modest – might be appropriate.

If we are to believe what we read these days, the unthinkable has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. The possibilities of an oil rig exploding, collapsing and sinking one mile into the ocean, and leaving an open, gushing stream of oil were so remote and fail-safed enough we were not to worry.

However it appears a perfect storm of events did occur to make that unthinkable a reality. Given that reality, we now realize that the human/ecosystem damage could be so vast that it might have been worthwhile to construct a simple thing like a containment dome and perhaps even another one or two strategies in advance. I’m not privy to the BP boardroom, but I’m betting that they wish they did, given the costs they are facing in retribution and cleanup.

It is ironic that the unthinkable should have been because twenty-one years ago an oil spill in Alaska coated 1,300 miles of Prince William Sound. It was another perfect storm. A tired Captain turned the ship over to a tired crewman with icebergs in the outer shipping lane, forcing the ship to sail an inner lane. Add to that the technology was not operating that would have alerted the crew to the rocks that the Exxon Valdez encountered. 

Ripley writes about this at the individual level. Even though we all know that being a passenger on a crashed plane is extremely remote, those who do survive report that they actually listen to the flight attendant’s instructions and identify the nearest exit. Or those that head to the attic in a flood take an axe with them.

As they become more resilient, communities should move from thinking about the thinkable and the probable to the unthinkable where the loss could be very high.