Table Of ContentRISK, SCIENCE, EXPERIENCE, AND CULTURE
IN DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
CHARLOTTE MAZEL-CABASSE
Waiting for the Big One
Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse
Waiting for the Big
One
Risk, Science, Experience, and Culture
in Disaster Preparedness
Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse
Data Science
Berkeley Institute for Data Science
Berkeley, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-15288-8 ISBN 978-3-030-15289-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15289-5
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For Etienne, Simon, Antonin,
and for my parents.
P
reface
Disasters impact millions of people every year. Some of these catastro-
phes gain high visibility in international media and some do not. When
they do, reporting tends to focus on the sequence of events that “make”
the disaster: perimeter, casualties, and cost. Sometimes, media become
interested in what happened before (often in a search for responsibilities)
and after. But in the life of the people affected by a disaster, these two
phases—preparedness and mitigation—are crucial and can transform the
entire experience of going through catastrophic events.
In risk-prone areas, experts and concerned residents take the burden
of considering how to best prepare for disasters. In the San Francisco
Bay Area, they have called themselves the Earthquake Junkies, playing
with the idea that preventing risk is like an addiction, something from
which they cannot desist, despite knowing that it may be detrimen-
tal to their own health and sanity. As I learned while undertaking this
research, being an Earthquake Junkie is hard: it requires understanding
the mechanics of the Earth’s crust and the dynamics of social environ-
ments. It requires the building of bridges between the hard and the soft
(Serres, 2006), scientific rigor and humility, and being able to reconcile
the many ways in which we—collectively—think about a disaster and can
help mitigate it. It also requires what French philosopher Emilie Hache
has described as a too-often disregarded competence of the Moderns—
that is, the capacity to use our emotional response to disaster as the trig-
ger for constructive action to “collectively put words on a collective fear
and draw energy to act” (quoted in Vincent, 2017).
vii
viii PREFACE
In this book, I have tried to show that disaster (such as earthquake,
but also fire) has several existences, they can—at the same time—be a
memory, a projection, and a probability. They are the sum of existing
knowledge of their mechanism at a moment T, but they can also be a
trauma, a source of jokes, an existence you want to forget. When I began
this field research, the prevailing concept within the community of sci-
entists and experts was that expert and lay knowledge were of different
natures and could not be compared, one being so evidently superior to
the other. I faced brutal pushback when I started talking about the emo-
tions and life experience of experts. Experts and scientists were not sup-
posed to have emotions; science was factual and rational, not emotional.
During the many years that I have spent in California, as a resident,
a student and, later, as a researcher, this conception of the knowledge
has been challenged time and time again. Not only did the experts that
I met during this research have an appreciation that was richer and more
complex than I had ever expected, but they also paid attention to the
interwoven and hybrid nature of the knowledge that they were produc-
ing. Experiencing the risk every day and working against it gave them a
nuanced—although not naïve—understanding of what it is to cherish a
place, its people, its culture and lifestyle and do everything to make sure
that a disaster will not reduce it to ashes.
The experts that I met might have been special in some ways: the Bay
Area metropolitan area was definitely something that residents, new and
old, earthquake experts or not, cared deeply about; the experience of the
Oakland Fire—forgotten by newcomer but still vivid for those who had
had to live through it—kept people on the alert. But I found that experts
were driven by the cheerful understanding that all of us, as a community,
will live better lives if some take on the burden of doing the risk prepar-
edness work, knowing that others were taking on the nonetheless impor-
tant aspects of collective life.
For a long time, I thought that Earthquake Junkies would be very
similar to climate scientists. They both developed incredible knowledge
about a system that could go wrong; they take it upon themselves to
educate the rest of us and ensure that the disaster that was certain to
happen could be mitigated in some way. They were on a mission, worked
long hours to improve the science, and tried to make decisions with
limited resources. As the COP24 (December 3–14, 2018, in Katowice,
Poland) shows, I realize this was perhaps an optimistic comparison.
While, in the Bay Area, earthquake experts had been listened to and their
PREFACE ix
advice and recommendations—although not followed to the letter—have
found their way to policy-makers and residents, matters seem to be tak-
ing a very different trajectory when it comes to climate change.
To be useful, Earthquake Junkies need to be heard and their contribu-
tion recognized. As Isabelle Stengers urges us, protecting the common
good is a collective action and we need to become better at the “art of
paying attention”. As she pointed out: “If there is an art and not just a
capacity, this is because it is a matter of learning and cultivating, that is to
say, making ourselves pay attention. Making in the sense that attention
here is not related to that which is defined as a priori worthy of atten-
tion, but as something that creates an obligation to imagine, to check, to
envisage, consequences that bring into play connections between what
we are in the habit of keeping separate. In short, making ourselves pay
attention in the sense that attention requires knowing how to resist the
temptation to separate what must be taken into account and what may
be neglected” (Stengers, 2015: 62).
Berkeley, USA Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse
references
Serres, M. (2006). Homo pontifex. L’art des ponts. Paris: Le Pommier.
Stengers, I. (2015). In Catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism (Critical
C). London, UK: Open Humanities Press and meson press. Retrieved from
http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stengers_2015_
In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf.
Vincent, C. (2017, December 29). En 2018, vous ne verrez plus le réchauffement
climatique comme une fatalité grâce à la philosophe Emilie Hache. Le Monde.
Retrieved from http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/12/29/en-2018-
vous-ne-verrez-plus-le-rechauffement-climatique-comme-une-fatalite-grace-a-
la-philosophe-emilie-hache_5235552_3232.html.
a
cknowledgements
I had the privilege to nurture this project with a fantastic editorial team
at Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature: I thank my editors Rachel
Daniel, Kyra Saniewski, and Madison Allums, as well as the fantastic pro-
duction team: Azarudeen Ahamed Sheriff, Prathipa Raju and Brian Halm
for their dedication and patient work throughout the different stages of
publication.
This book owes much to a group of dedicated scholars that organized
workshops and collaborations across the globe: Professor Joonhong Ahn,
who unfortunately passed away in June 2016, and whose contribution to
the field has been of incredible importance; Cathryn Carson, who helped
me bridge different interests and fields of research in a way for I shall
always be grateful; Kim Fortun, Franck Guarnieri and Sulfikar Amir.
Patiently following my intellectual travels and geographical wan-
derings (or was it the other way around?), Valérie November helped
me not to deviate from the course of what graduate school is sup-
posed to be. I would also like to thank Professors Saul Perlmutter,
David Culler, and Henry Brady, as well as the Berkeley Institute for
Data Science’s outstanding team of fellows and co-PIs and the program
directors of The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and The Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation for helping me embark on other fascinating—and
risky—projects.
It has been a great pleasure to conduct interviews with the scientists
and experts regarding earthquake risk in the Bay Area. Here, I specifi-
cally want to express my gratitude to Marjorie Green, Special Projects
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Manager at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI),
for connecting me with her network of colleagues and friends: the
Earthquake Junkies. Each interview has opened a window on the many
ways in which people have engaged with the earthquake in the Bay Area.
I also want to thank Peggy Hellweg, from the Berkeley Seismological
Laboratory, for helping me walk through the complexity of this new field
of research.
Throughout the years of my study, the friendship of fellow research-
ers Hélène Mialet, Kyoko Sato, Reiko Hasegawa, Laura Noren, Stuart
Geiger, Nelle Varoquaux and Christine Fassert, and Nicolas Benvegnu
(to name a fews) has been a precious gift. I also want to thank my grand-
mother, my parents, my always inspirational siblings and cousins, and
their growing families. Thank you also to my extended family for being
a constant support in our lives. My dear friends have been always patient
and encouraging: thank you for bearing with me, with us, all these years.
This book could have not been written without the dedication of a team
of babysitters and nannies who extended my working days and have been
infinitely patient (or so it seems) with our messy organization. It has also
beneficated of the careful editing of Donald L. Woodward, Kristine Jones
and Karen Kelsky (@The Professor Is In). As for my own family: I owe
you more than I can say, and I am looking forward to starting a new
chapter of our life together.
This work has beneficiated from the support of the Swiss National
Science Foundation.
