The Sociology of Disaster

Fictional Explorations of Human Experiences

Thomas E. Drabek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367253042
• eBook ISBN: 9781000651980
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In a book as illuminating as it is captivating, Thomas E. Drabek presents an in-depth analysis of the emotional impacts of disaster events and the many ripple effects that follow.

Through the technique of storytelling, a series of nine fictional stories where characters experience actual disasters of different types throughout the United States illustrate the vulnerabilities and resilience to enhance the readers understanding of disaster consequences. Designed for classroom use, each story is followed by an "Analysis" section wherein discussion and research paper topics are recommended. These highlight links to published research findings. A "References" section details citations for all works included. Brief commentary in a "Notes" section adds further connections to other disasters and relevant research studies.

The Sociology of Disaster is an important innovation in disaster education and will become an invaluable resource within universities and colleges that offer degrees in emergency management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

1

GIVE THEM A CHARACTER¹

“Give them a character? Say what?” Those were the words I confronted a few years ago during a presentation to a group of local emergency managers. That question really was the origin of this book. I was invited to discuss our bestselling synthesis of the knowledge base related to The Human Side of Disaster (Drabek 2010). This presentation occurred after the second edition was published (Drabek 2013).

As I described the first chapter, “Experiences,” I emphasized my successes with it in my own classes and numerous conference presentations. It is comprised of six short scenarios—two to three pages in length. All were original fiction that illustrated aspects of documented human response to disaster. Readers first meet a “character,” I called him “Sam Wilson”. In the story, Sam is carrying his injured grandson outside the Indianapolis Coliseum following the 1963 propane gas explosion. As he struggles his way through the throngs of people exiting, he notices a line of taxi cabs near the doors. He does not see any ambulances or EMS personnel, so he decides to grab a cab, rather than try to find his car in the crowded parking lots. When he enters the cab, he instructs the driver, “Get us to the nearest hospital. This kid is hurt bad.”

Without meaning to contribute to the ensuing chaos, his act, like that of so many others that night, did not conform to the city disaster plan. Nor did it reflect the expectations of local emergency officials. The nearest hospitals, where most of the nearly 400 injured audience members ended up, did not have 24-hour emergency rooms. And local emergency personnel were dumbfounded for a while as to where all of the victims had gone and how they got there.

For my students, this “character” and his experiences greatly enhanced their understanding of a core concept—organized-disorganization.

As I was explaining this example to my questioner, I was pleased with the intervention of one of the other emergency managers who spoke up after my brief response. “You really should read this book. When you do, you may discover, like I did, the first chapter that he just described is the best part. I mean all of us have read some of these types of social science findings in different training materials. But his characters really helped bring this stuff to life.”

That experience, plus my classroom successes with this material, planted the seed. So after finishing several articles and book chapters I had promised, I decided to push myself outside of my own comfort zone. Never before, aside from the six very short scenarios that comprised the first chapters in both the first and second editions of The Human Side of Disaster, had I ever tried to imagine a complete short story that might reflect research findings, not myth. During the summer of 2017, 13 years after my formal retirement from the University of Denver, I let my mind explore.

But first I needed some schooling. I turned to several successful authors and studied their styles, approaches, and storytelling techniques. Among the first of these was a collection of Irish writers whose magical chapters introduced me to the occupants of Finbar’s Hotel (Bolger 1997). The characters in this fictitious Dublin hotel caused me to remember interviews I completed following the Big Thompson Flood in Colorado during the summer of 1976. When you read “Faces of Fear” (Chapter 3), you will see my effort to learn from these writers.

Another influential collection was published by one of our favorite story tellers, Pam Houston (1995; see also Houston 2005; 1992). When not teaching somewhere else, Pam resides near the small town of Creede, about 50 miles over Slumgullion Pass from Lake City, Colorado where our small cabin is located. Recently, she (2019) completed a sensitive and insightful book that reveals her love of this area and the wisdom it has helped her gain. As one who enjoyed several years of elk hunting in the rugged San Juan Mountains in years past, I studied the mix of views she (1995) collected from nearly four dozen women whose stories about hunting varied from ecstasy to disgust and rejection. But whatever the view of hunting, always there is shared insight into the power of storytelling as a means of enhancing understanding. When I read Terry Tempest Williams’ story (1995) titled “Deerskin,” this point came home like a rifle bullet.

Many years have passed since that morning, but I often reflect on the relationship my brothers and father share with deer. Looking back and looking forward into the Navajo Way, I have come to realize the power of oral traditions, of stories, even in our own culture, and how they color our perceptions of the world around us.

(Williams 1995, 78)

Similarly, as I reviewed the remarkable collection of short stories that Wendy Martin (1990) selected, I noted the wisdom in her words.

Surely one of the most effective—and most pleasurable—ways of understanding the issues facing us today is to make an empathic leap of understanding through fiction; as the stories in this collection make abundantly clear, it is only through knowing one another that we can know ourselves. Thus, these stories can teach us much about women’s lives, American lives, and life in general.

(Martin 1990, 7)

Eventually, I started making some notes about different themes that I could develop. As I did so, I was inspired by the advice offered by Patrice Vecchione (2015). When I shuffled through my file folder of notes, looking for order and a way to begin, her words hit a nerve.

A found thing—nature or human made—may be just what you need to spark an entire story. And if you collect objects and experiences you can use them to fill the nest of your projects.

(Vecchione 2015, 44)

Well, I had plenty of experiences having been to dozens of torn-up places during my five decades of disaster research. So where to start? One morning I woke up with a man talking to me. It is likely that this “awakening experience” was related to my introduction to disaster studies at the Disaster Research Center (DRC) at The Ohio State University in September, 1963 (Drabek 2019). It was there that I participated in a study of the Indianapolis Coliseum explosion (Drabek 1968) and completed my doctoral dissertation focused on police communications during disaster (Drabek 1969). Knowles’ (2011) summary of the development of the DRC (230–249) is most informative and provides an important juxtaposition to other approaches to mitigation like that used by fire and insurance professionals to create “the invisible screen of safety” (110–161).

I recall hearing our former University of Denver classmate—Sandy Dallas—describing something similar. At a book signing she explained that when she is working on a novel, some of her characters will “talk” to her, sometimes in the early morning hours. So, on this day I “met” a man—Sean Ingram—whose story comprises Chapter 4, “Trapped.” It was the first story I drafted after making notes over the next few months. I am convinced that his story like the others in this collection will help university students and emergency management personnel—both pre and post-professional—gain a more in-depth understanding of the human consequences of disaster. For too often we think only in “bean counter” terms—that is, the number killed or injured or economic cost be it in estimated dollars or number of homes or businesses damaged or destroyed. These metrics, while important, constrain our understanding of how strained social systems contribute to human failure, pain, and, at times, premature death. Enhanced awareness and understanding of these matters come from knowing the stories of impacted “characters.” Such enhanced understanding—an increased capacity for empathy—is my objective in writing this research-based set of fictional accounts. Before opening the first of these accounts, in Chapter 2, let me briefly discuss the intellectual context that led me to this journey.

Disaster events frequently have inspired novelists, screen and play writers, poets, and musicians (Drabek 2018). Only recently, however, have such products of popular culture been studied by disaster and hazard sociologists (Quarantelli and Davis 2011). Webb, in particular, has alerted us to their importance (Webb, Wachtendorf, and Eyre 2000; Webb 2006; Webb 2018). Quarantelli (1980), Scanlon, Luukko, and Morton (1978), and others like Fischer (1998), have assessed numerous examples of these. Although there is variation, most portrayals reflect a great deal of mythology. And their impacts have been documented (Wenger, Sebok, and Neff 1980). Hence, most of the public, and even emergency government officials who have been surveyed, revealed inaccurate and highly distorted images of disaster behavior (Drabek 1986). Consequently, few professors teaching disaster and hazard studies have attempted to integrate works from the humanities into their courses. Those that have typically used movies or television “documentaries” to illustrate disaster mythology and its propagation. A noteworthy exception is recent work by Etkin (2016) who has placed disaster theory into the much larger philosophical and historical analyses of environmental issues and large-scale events.

Recently, however, Haney and Lovekamp (2018) completed an exceptional “state-of-the-art” summary of new developments and future needs in disaster/hazards education. Recognizing that “teaching about disaster remains mostly marginalized” (209), they effectively edited two special issues of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters (November, 2018 and March, 2019). This was a significant step in highlighting new approaches, like the use of disaster movies (Kendra, Siebeneck, and Andrew 2018), fact based original fiction (Drabek 2019), or guiding students through an “immersion” into post-flood recovery activities (Brown and Even 2018). This contribution by Haney and Lovekamp was a significant development that signaled a major expansion in the future focus and dissemination techniques used by disaster studies professionals. It is clear that the past is the past as these and other new directions are pursued.

Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to university curricula have waxed and waned over the past four decades. As one fad or another has been endorsed by administrators of a particular institution, many of their faculty have rebelled or quietly sabotaged implementation efforts. Hence, examples abound of “policy written” being far afield from “policy in action”. Clearly this has this been the case when efforts have been made to integrate important insights from the humanities with physical and social science instruction. Yet, as the pace of political, social and technological change has quickened, many of us believe—as we did decades ago—that disciplinary boundaries must be traversed by both professors and students. Indeed, such navigational skills parallel other basic capabilities inherent in the very definition of “the liberal arts”—qualities like critical thinking, creativity, and so on.

For me personally, the discovery of C.P. Snow’s (2012) explanation of the differences among the cultures of physical scientists, social scientists and those working within the humanities was transformative. I followed this with explorations of critics like Coser (1963) and Mills (1959;1960) to mention a few. Eventually, this resulted in a collaborative effort with Gresham Sykes to produce a volume that expanded the perspectives of criminology students (Sykes and Drabek 1969). We assembled a collection of short cuttings from numerous works ranging from Plato and Hobbes to Twain and Orwell to Thoreau and Dostoevsky. These were contrasted to images of crime and criminals through cuttings from Tom Wolfe (1965), who described southern “good ole boys”, Burgess’ (1962) novel A Clockwork Orange, and other fictional descriptions. The cuttings were integrated with “connective tissue” that tied each piece into a coherent whole. Sociological analyses by Cressey, Sutherland, Merton, Bell, Short and Strodtbeck, and many others linked these works to more classical criminological and sociological theories. In this way students emerged with a broad understanding of the social dynamics and historical changes in defining what behavior is labeled as a “crime”, the role of social factors that contribute to differential rates of crime, the components of the legal crime processing networks and ideas of reform.

As we worked on this project, I recall reading the collection of writings edited by Spectorsky (1958) which he titled The College Years. Through this very diverse collection

of writing by and about those men and women who have enjoyed the university experience, a unique adventure which, in each generation, brings together the cream of the crop to spend unforgettable years between the end of adolescence and the attainment of full maturity, in a place of its own, where each day spells growth, excitement, interaction of people and ideas, stimulation—and downright good fun.

(Spectorsky 1958, 11)

And so among the dozens of writers whose work is included, we absorb the insights from people like Shirley Jackson, who tells us how to be a faculty wife, that is “a person married to a faculty” (Jackson 1958, 311). For in Jackson’s eyes there are three big thorns—her husband, her husband’s colleagues, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Give Them a Character
• 2. Survival
• 3. Faces of Fear
• 4. Trapped
• 5. In the Line of Duty
• 6. Angry Women
• 7. The Letters
• 8. Kentucky Tidal Waves
• 9. They’re All Gone
• 10. Migrations
• 11. Key Insights
• Suggested Readings
• Author Index
• Subject Index