By Rachel Becker
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After 33 years at the USGS, Jones retired and opened the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, which aims to boost community resilience using science. In her book, she lays out catastrophic disasters in human history from the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii to Hurricane Katrina to the Tohoku quake in Japan in 2011. She tells both the scientific story of how disasters unfolded, and the human story of the communities they struck.
Her goal is to teach readers about disasters by drawing them in with narratives, and to address the ways human nature can make it harder to prepare for the future. Most of us assume a big disaster is going to be similar to smaller ones we’ve experienced, which can make us overconfident in our ability to deal with catastrophes — something experts call “normalization bias.” Our tendency to focus on more immediate threats can also come at the expense of preparing for more distant ones — which makes sense, Jones says: “If you worry about the 100-year flood and not about the wolf that’s about to eat your children, your DNA does not get passed down.”
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[Question] "I grew up in California, and only learned about the 1861-1862 flood last year. How do you keep the memory of such a major disaster fresh, and make sure that people don’t forget that this could happen again?"
[Answer] It’s very difficult to do. In a natural world, if we hadn’t built all of our flood control systems, we would have smaller floods much more often. When you have the smaller ones, at least you know that flooding is a risk. But you do tend to believe that the risk is what you’ve already dealt with. So, paradoxically, the flood managers who were fully aware of the 1861 flood seemed more willing to say, ‘We’ve got it covered. That isn’t really going to happen again.”
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