Libya floods were not a random disaster. It was a climate driven risk manifesting in a way that affected infrastructure that was built on old assumptions.
There have been cracks running down areas of freeway around Austin this past summer. They send construction crews out during odd hours when there's the least amount of traffic and repair it. The video KingCheetah shared highlights how citizens interviewed pleaded for years to address the cracks in the dams and other infrastructure maintenance concerns. It really was the Onion video. Austin's heat wave takes a toll on TxDOT crews and area roads
Not well, as we continue to see pretty much everywhere. It's the classic prevention problem. How do you convince elected officials/leaders and the public to spend money on prevention when the result of that spending will ideally be not much happening? After a few years of not much happening, how do you justify continued prevention spending? Our system (and the same is true in most countries) is biased towards throwing money at disaster response, pretending to learn our lesson and putting a little towards prevention and preparedness, then taking that money away after a couple of years when people have forgotten about the previous disaster. Rinse, repeat. That's not such a huge problem when disasters are infrequent, but when they become more common and are often compound disasters, it becomes untenable. It's also a problem of imagination. We have trouble thinking about things we haven't experienced. How could Libyans imagine a rain so hard that multiple dams fail? It had not happened before. How could Lahaina game out a fast moving fire that destroys the whole town? It hadn't happened before. Nothing close to those two disasters had happened in those areas. When we talk about how the changing climate makes human systems (social, political, economic) brittle, this is what we mean. Our current way of thinking about the world and doing things in this world are still built on outdated assumptions. We need to change fast.
If you think investing in prevention is a problem here, I've seen way too many disaster/corruption clips about China where the construction contractor skimps on adhering/enforcing engineering tolerances and best practices only for random failures to happen well before the structure's expected lifetime. The things we take for granted as a result from learning hard mistakes generations ago... Time to reshuffle the deck for a new round.
Photos: Afghanistan hit by another earthquake (3) https://www.npr.org/sections/pictur.../photos-afghanistan-hit-by-another-earthquake
