What follows is a more philosophical take on monitoring disasters and why what you read here is typically different from other places.
Hazard analysis – be it for natural disasters or human driven catastrophes like wars – often seem like an exercise in abstract number crunching. It’s hard to balance what the vast majority of people will experience with what a few individuals experience. For a storm like Debby with localized flooding it’s especially hard because the impacts can be extremely severe in one place but non-existent a few blocks away. This is one reason why what you read here seems to have a different “spin” than other places: I’m trying to convey what the majority of people will experience, and the impacts in context, while emergency managers are concerned with the bad if not worst case, and the typically the normal media sources are just trying to keep you engaged, which means they need drama, so they focus on the individual tragedies at the expense of the big picture.
Last year a number of severe thunderstorms passed through Georgia and South Carolina, and there were over 200 messages from various National Weather Service offices tabulating damage – the “Local Storm Reports.” These are collected from emergency services and the general public, and are valuable for collecting information on the impact of storms. I use them often in my work. Here is what the reports transmitted over 24 hours looked like for the Savannah area …
These reports come in over one of my satellite links, go in to a data base, and are cross referenced with model predictions and other data to help improve the models and, ultimately, saving lives by helping to create better forecasts, better plans, and more resilient societies.
When I want to see them, I create a KML (Google Earth) file from the raw reports for easy viewing, and sometimes post them here or on social media so people can see where damage occurred. But it is important to keep in mind there is a story behind each one of these icons. The vast majority of the time the reports are mundane like a power outage, or this one reporting a tree down …
Sometimes they are more sober, reporting damage to a home or business. Occasionally they are even amusing, depending on what happened or how the forecaster entered the message, like the chicken that escaped custody but was later rounded up by local authorities.
But then something like this pops up that reinforces the fact than nature and random chance can be cruel … In this case, a tree fell on a vehicle and killed a man in his car.
What are the odds of that? Pretty low – generally these kinds of events cause relatively few if any casualties. But of course “relatively few” in this case translates into a father not coming home, and a family whose lives will never be the same again.
In my work I often have to deal with events that impact thousands to millions of people. I find that some, especially politicians, start to treat people in general and death in particular as a statistic; there is the famous saying, “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.” (attributed to Stalin, but he probably didn’t say it even if it probably reflects his attitude to an extent – however I doubt Stalin cared too much for the one ether). But the opposite can often be true as well – becoming paralyzed because, out of thousands or millions, random chance and low to moderate risk events do, sometimes, cause deaths.
Keeping perspective in the modern media environment is difficult as well, as damage and death are often overemphasized to make stories dramatic, or ignored, depending on what else is going on and the narrative of the day.
In these pages and in future posts you will no doubt see phrases like “not especially dangerous” or “if nothing breaks that shouldn’t.” And most of the time that will be true. It’s hard to keep a balance sometimes – staying objective, keeping perspective, yet never forgetting that behind the numbers and icons are real people. Hopefully we can walk that narrow, difficult path.
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thanks for your thoughtful assessment
Thank you for your reasoning, nuance and caring. You are a blessing to me and my family as well as any who are smart enough to read your follow your work. 💗🙏🏻🙋🏼♀️
That was a sobering and honest post. 😔👍🏼🙏🏼 I actually know someone personally, who was randomly hit while in her car, by a falling tree due to Debby. 🥹 She survived but has a long road to recovery. 🙏🏼 Thanks for what you do!
You, my friend are a scientifically trained, decent, empathic human being. There aren’t that many of us willing to identify as that these days. I admire that you do..
Thank you. I appreciate the information you gather, interpret and share and also how you explain it in ways we lay people can understand. I also like your sense of humor and the songs you pick!
Thank you for continuing to pursue (and accomplish) this balance in your posts. It’s refreshing, especially when other sources are toying with our heartstrings to keep us scrolling/reading/worrying. You have really helped ease my anxieties over the years while encouraging safety and keeping it real.