How do you prepare for disaster potential?
I certainly appreciate the surprising amount of family and friends who called or wrote Monday to make sure we were safe in Kansas. Interestingly enough, this past Sunday, my family was in our local city hall's basement because the slightest chance of a tornado existed and we have made the family plan to take no chances whatsoever. We live about a half hour South of Topeka, Kansas and we were in the same city hall basement last year three times, and twice the year before when Reading, Kansas and Joplin, Missouri got hit hard. For me, human performance behavior has everything you do to prevent unwanted outcomes. Do you see a correlation, or do you feel I am extrapolating into a different type of contextual environment?
What can you control?
You can't control weather that may hit your house, but you most likely can control where you will be when it has the opportunity. I myself was actually driving home from work two summers ago when my car was hit by lightning. I went to the Emergency Room for an EKG and suffered only a left inner elbow spasm injury. However, my car wasn't so lucky. There was over $12,500 damage to my 2011 Hyundai Sonata, and about a month after the lightning strike, I was driving it straight from the repair facility to the dealership trading it in for another almost identical model. Wrong place, wrong time, or could I have done something different? I personally in an instant heard the loudest thing I've ever heard and seen the brightest light I had ever seen. The dealership told me because the blast hit the hood of the car that the windshield actually saved my life from the blast intensity - it was entirely "scarred" and needed to be replaced.
Aren't unwanted outcomes reduced from early warning?
I wanted to think about something else, yet I can't help but write about this tonight. (Any of the upcoming tornado statistic in this post are from watching CNN tonight.) Some reports stated that the residents of Moore, Oklahoma had plenty amount of warning, and others say that 16 to 30 minutes was simply not enough time to get everyone somewhere safe from the devastating effects - at times 2 miles wide and on the ground for 45 minutes with as much as 200 mph winds, this storm may be the worst on record before the data collection is complete. In work terms a trend is an unacceptable amount of occurrences - well, I'd say 3 times in 14 years taking very similar paths through the same city qualifies and one of those storms in 1999 was known as the most devastating tornado ever record on the planet. Do these families have no other choice but to live in this area, and if so, they need more safe, hardened shelters. This almost parallels with not having enough lifeboats on the Titanic.
70 people in America were killed by tornadoes last year. At least 51 killed in Monday's storm and 145 hospitalized. (I am actively choosing to not discuss children stats.)
When trying to answer an obvious question, the CNN newscaster said something that struck a theme with me. The production versus prevention curve seems to ring a bell when I heard that it is very expensive for homebuilders to build basements or storm shelters under houses in that area because of the rock content in the ground. That information helps outsiders like me understand a little more about why there aren't as many shelters as one would expect in a tornado heavy area of the U.S.
Learning versus education
I really connect with this quote from educator Stephen Heppell, "Learning prepares you to cope with surprises. Education prepares you to cope with certainties." This can be used in many contexts, but applying it to the evacuation and shelter philosophy, do we feel like we are learning from the lessons of Joplin and any other past tornado experience we have to coping with potential unwanted outcomes? Isn't there a certainty here?
Final thought on this
I leave you with a thought that frustrates me the most - Why does anyone have to die in this modern society from a somewhat predictable weather-related cause? It would devastate me that lack of a place to take shelter in this tornado-alley region where people live is the reason. People deserve a safe place to go. Another Titanic lesson we need to pay attention to - ensure there are always enough life-boats.