Scientists Contend Disaster Warning Often Is Ignored

Weeks before Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, melting glaciers and unleashing torrents of mud that buried 25,000 people, geologists drafted a map showing exactly where the muck would flow.

The 17,700-foot volcano started spewing ash Sept. 11, 1985. Scientists gave the map to officials Oct. 7 and urged them to start emergency preparations. A newspaper published the map a couple days later. But survivors of the deadly Nov. 13 eruption complained that they were not warned.

“There were no evacuations ordered as a result of the map,” which also may not have been understood by residents who saw it, said Robert Tilling, a U.S. Geological Survey volcanologist. “That shouldn’t have happened. The whole emergency response network failed and, as a result, thousands died.”

Geologists’ Warnings

Time and again geologists have warned of impending disasters or urged that steps be taken to reduce the death toll in future catastrophes. Many of these efforts have been ignored because of politics, economic concerns, uncertainty in their predictions, communications failures and the very human tendency to avoid unpleasant realities.

“Geophysicists more than once warned builders of the high seismic activity in northwest Armenia,” the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said after the Dec. 7 earthquake that rocked a part of Soviet Armenia known for centuries for deadly quakes. At least 24,000 people died, entombed in collapsed adobe huts, stone homes and inadequately reinforced concrete slab buildings.

“Who closed their eyes to the warnings of the seismologists, here and in other regions?” Pravda asked.

The earthquake that killed 10,000 people in Mexico City in 1985 collapsed about 1,000 buildings although scientists and engineers knew that damaging seismic waves would be amplified by the lake bed upon which the city was built, said Thomas Hanks, Geological Survey engineering seismology chief.

Information Must Be Used

“It’s not enough to assess hazards. Something has to be done with this information,” Geological Survey scientist C. Dan Miller told 200 officials in November when the agency held a “Geohazards ‘88” symposium in Menlo Park on how science can save lives from quakes, volcanoes and landslides.

Earthquakes, landslides, tidal waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, volcanic eruptions and wildfires killed more than 2.8 million people worldwide in the last 20 years, and caused up to $100 billion in property damage, said a 1987 National Research Council report.

“The impacts of natural hazards are increasing and will continue to do so unless the world community takes concerted action,” the report said, urging a worldwide scientific effort in the 1990s to reduce the natural disaster toll.

“We have enough knowledge already, if properly applied, to reduce both human and property losses substantially,” the report said.

But many nations lack the money or the political and social institutions capable of acting, said Julia Taft, director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. “The greatest human burden from natural catastrophes falls on the poor, powerless and helpless victims in the Third World.”

Even in Los Angeles, costs and political complexity have made a multiyear process out of the effort to strengthen or raze thousands of unreinforced brick buildings that otherwise would become death traps in a major quake.

Current technology could reduce the risks for 350 million people living on or near potentially dangerous volcanoes, Tilling said. “The challenge lies in marshaling the political will and resources, currently lacking, to study and adequately monitor the world’s high-risk volcanoes.”

Closer Monitoring

In the United States, volcanoes are monitored more closely, yet the public appears reluctant to prepare for disasters that cannot be predicted with certainty.

When Mt. St. Helens’ north flank started to swell after eruptions in March, 1980, scientists warned of possible catastrophe. Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray restricted access, drawing criticism from tourism-dependent businesses. But after the volcano blew up May 18, 1980, the families of some of the 57 victims unsuccessfully sued the state, alleging that restricted zones were kept too small because of pressure from a logging operation.

Some business people in the Sierra ski resort of Mammoth Lakes were outraged when the U.S. Geological Survey declared a “notice of potential volcanic hazard” for the Long Valley caldera on May 26, 1982, prompted by thousands of quakes in two years, new steam vents, uplift of the crater floor and signs of magma. The town, in the crater that erupted 730,000 years ago, suffered economically. A second escape route from town was built, monitoring and warning systems were installed, and the state prepared an emergency plan.

The reaction demonstrated the instinct “to shoot the messenger,” Mono County Supervisor Andrea Mead Lawrence said at the symposium. “Realize you have triggered forces in human nature that are bigger than you are, and maybe bigger than the volcano that may or may not go off.

“People in the community are never going to stand up and cheer.”

Bureaucratic Obstacles

Sometimes geologists’ advice runs into bureaucratic obstacles.

In 1983, 250 Malibu homes collapsed, cracked or slid off their foundations in the Big Rock Mesa landslide. Homeowner lawsuits accused Los Angeles County officials of suppressing geologists’ warnings when they allowed development on the mesa. The county denied the allegations, but settled out of court last month with 240 of the homeowners for $97 million.

A more common problem is that geologists “are far too conservative in trying to inform public officials about hazards. There’s almost a conspiracy between the scientific and business community not to rock the boat. They hide behind a cloud of uncertainty,” said Berkeley City Councilman Alan Goldfarb.

“We don’t want to over-scare, but we don’t want to under-scare,” said Mike Guerin of California’s Office of Emergency Services.

Scientists and citizens also have trouble dealing with warnings of disasters that are inevitable but infrequent.

“Because nothing in the way of earthquakes is really happening 99.99999% of the time at any given place,” Hanks said, “stoking the earthquake consciousness, even in California, presents unusual challenges.”