"Awaiting arrival of next ‘black swan’; Researchers gauge disasters" by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post / March 27, 2011
WASHINGTON — Disaster bureaucrats talk about black swans: calamities from out of the blue, terrible and strange. The world is now transfixed by the black swan disaster of Japan — an earthquake larger than seismologists thought could happen in that part of the country, leading to a tsunami too big for the sea walls, and now a nuclear crisis that wasn’t supposed to be possible.
“People talk about the Big One. This is it,’’ said Tom O’Rourke, a Cornell University professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of the federal Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazard Reduction. “This is what the Big One looks like. We’ve had an imaginative idea of what the Big One would be like if it struck a major, populated, modern society.’’
Japan’s nightmare comes in the wake of two other events that scientists found surprising in their location and intensity: the highly destructive earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Feb. 22, which was triggered by a little-regarded fault; and the tsunami-spawning Sumatra earthquake Dec. 26, 2004, on a trench not considered likely to cause such a “mega-quake.’’
It may seem as if there are more natural disasters these days, but the real issue is that there are more people and more property vulnerable to the violent forces of Earth. Natural disasters are supplemented by technological disasters — last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico being one example.
Disaster planners in the United States have to ask themselves how they would deal not only with the obvious types of calamities — Gulf Coast hurricanes, for example — but also the events that are of low probability but come with high consequences.
“You don’t get to pick the next disaster. You don’t necessarily know where the threats are,’’ said Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We plan for the things we know, but we also plan for the things we don’t know.’’
And they were in New York City the day before 9/11 preparing for drills.
The term “black swan’’ was coined and popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a New York University professor of risk engineering and author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.’’
People debate what qualifies as a black swan. Most alleged black swans turn out to have obvious precursors and warning signs — the Sept. 11 attacks included. Nothing comes out of the blue, truly.
Yeah, it turns out in that case it was governments and intelligence agencies coordinating and planning the inside job -- and the AmeriKan media helped sell the cover story and cover up.
The next big disaster could be something off the radar of most Americans. A solar flare, for example, could trigger a geomagnetic storm that could knock out much of the nation’s power grid. Or an earthquake could hit an East Coast city not generally considered vulnerable to a major temblor.
That sounds like paranoia, but mainstream scientists and government officials research such things....
And if you read it on a blog they would holler conspiracy theorist!
Some hazards are well publicized at this point but highly unlikely for centuries to come, such as a full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, sometimes referred to as a supervolcano.
So now the government is researching sensationalist movie plots?
If Yellowstone were to explode, it would be an event thousands of times more violent than the Mount St. Helens eruption, and its effect would be felt across much of the western United States.
And far beyond, of course; however, the AmeriKan media wouldn't want you to think that. Radiation can't reach us and, blah, blah, blah.
But it has been 640,000 years since the last such event and, although the caldera is active and generates swarms of small earthquakes, there is no sign that a major event will happen in the lifetime of anyone around today.
Some hazards become more prominent with new scientific research.
Only in the past couple of decades have scientists come to appreciate the threat posed by the Cascadia subduction zone, a tectonic plate boundary running just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, from Northern California to Vancouver Island. It could generate a megaquake like the one that just hit Japan.
What about the Cumbre Vieja?
Disaster preparation requires a careful calibration of risk and a strong sense of what’s a reasonable level of caution. Society cannot protect itself from everything that conceivably could go wrong.
Unle$$ it'$ the terrori$t threat.
I'm just wondering when government actually did protect us from something. They sure didn't protect us telling war lies and letting Wall Street loot us.
Even at nuclear power plants, where safeguards are piled on top of safeguards, there is a point at which the operation becomes too expensive for anyone to attempt....
That's when government steps in with taxpayer-financed "loans."
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