The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer

by John C. Mutter

  30.Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  31.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).

  32.Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010).

  33.Friedrich Schneider, “Size and Measurement of the Informal Economy in 110 Countries around the World,” paper presented at a Workshop of Australian National Tax Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, July 2002, http://www.amnet.co.il/attachments/informal_economy110.pdf.

  34.“Sex, Drugs and GDP: Italy’s Inclusion of Illicit Activities in Its Figures Excites Much Interest,” Economist, May 31, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21603073-italys-inclusion-illicit-activities-its-figures-excites-much-interest-sex; Sarah O’Connor, “Sex, Drugs and GDP—How Did the ONSZ Do It?” Financial Times, May 2014, http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/29/sex-drugs-and-gdp-how-did-the-ons-do-it/; Angela Monaghan, “Drugs and Prostitution to Be Included in UK National Accounts,” Guardian, May 29, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/29/drugs-prostitution-uk-national-accounts.

  35.The Big Mac Index, http://bigmacindex.org/.

  Chapter 2. The Geography of Wealth and Poverty: Knowledge and Natural Disasters

  1.John L. Gallup, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Andrew D. Mellinger, “Geography and Economic Development,” International Regional Science Review 22, 2 (1999): 179–232.

  2.Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2013).

  3.C. Mayhew and R. Simmon, Earth’s City Lights, October 23, 2000. Retrieved from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Visible Earth: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167.

  4.By proxy we mean a factor that can be measured that is directly related to something of interest that cannot be measured directly. The properties of tree rings, for instance, are used to obtain information about past temperatures but do not measure temperature directly.

  5.William Spence, Stuart A. Sipkin, and George L. Choy, “Measuring the Size of an Earthquake,” Earthquakes and Volcanoes 21, no. 1 (1989): 58–63, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/measure.php.

  6.Many basic textbooks describe plate tectonics. A good college-level book with excellent illustrations is Stephen Marshak, Earth: Portrait of a Planet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). The Wikipedia site at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics is quite comprehensive and cites many good references.

  7.R. A. Rohde, “Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Intensity Scale,” NASA Earth Observatory, November 2, 2006, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7079.

  8.Flood means the result of heavy rains inland, sometimes called freshwater flooding, as distinct from flooding due to storm surge from the ocean.

  9.The explosion of Krakatoa Island killed about 36,000 people in the tsunami that followed its eruption; that explosion was the loudest sound made on Earth in modern times and was heard as far as 3,000 miles away.

  10.Incorporated Institutes for Seismology, Education and Outreach, http://www.iris.edu/hq/programs/education_and_outreach.

  11.The Coriolis force (strictly an effect, not a force) operates on any rotating body. On Earth, it causes anything moving across the face of the planet in any direction other than exactly east or exactly west to be deflected from its intended path. So if a small, not-so-fast airplane were to start off in London heading due south to Accra, the capital of Ghana (on the same line of longitude), it would probably land in Senegal on the coast of West Africa. Accra moved east as the airplane made its journey due south. In a frame of reference in which the Earth is fixed, the airplane appears to be deflected westward. The exact opposite happens in the Southern Hemisphere. Consider the same airplane trying to fly north from Johannesburg to Cairo. More details can be found at HyperPhysics, Coriolis Force, a resource hosted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/corf.html.

  12.No cyclones form at the equator or for about five degrees of latitude (300 miles) on either side. The reasons for these two blank zones differ. In the equatorial belt, the Coriolis effect is too small to cause rotation of the disorganized “stormlettes” that initiate cyclones. In the South Atlantic, sea surface temperatures are a little too low for cyclone formation, and high-level vertical wind shear is too strong to permit the formation of cyclones (the top more or less blows off), and the inter-tropical convergence zone of strong evaporation and cloud formation doesn’t come far enough south there.

  13.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Weather Service, “Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale,” May 24, 2013; http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php.

  14.Another common way to describe this is through the idea of an observation window. You can think of it as the period of time during which a phenomenon has been observed. So, for instance, we need to observe the weather in Paris for only a few years to know that it commonly rains there, but to know how the El Niño affects how much it rains, we would need to observe for many decades because the El Niño recurs every three to seven years and we would want to have observed its effect several times.

  15.Ross S. Stein, “Earthquake Conversations,” Scientific American 288 (2003): 72–79. Also published in Our Ever Changing Earth, Scientific American, Special Edition 15, no. 2 (2005): 82–89.

  16.Tokuji Utsu, Yosihiko Ogata, Ritsuko S. Matsu’ura, “The Centenary of the Omori Formula for a Decay Law of Aftershock Activity,” Journal of the Physics of the Earth 43 (1995): 1–33.

  17.John C. Mutter, “Voices: Italian Seismologists: What Should They Have Said?” Earth Magazine, July 1, 2010, http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/voices-italian-seismologists-what-should-they-have-said.

  18.Tia Ghose, “L’Aquila Earthquake Forces Geologists to Rethink Risk,” Live Science, December 11, 2012, http://www.livescience.com/25420-laquila-earthquake-lessons.html.

  19.For more on fault creep, see United States Geological Survey, “Haywood—Creeping Fault,” geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/sfgeo/quaternary/stories/hayward_creep.html.

  20.Roger Bilhan, “The Seismic Future of Cities,” Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering 7, no. 4 (November 2009): 839–87. See also an interview with Bilham at World Bank, “Seismic Future of Cities. Interview with Dr. Roger Bilham,” February 22, 2011, http://go.worldbank.org/GTQ1AL0AG0.

  21.Travis Daub, “China’s War on Illegal Buildings,” The Rundown (blog), PBS Newshour, August 17, 2010, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/chinas-war-on-illegal-buildings/.

  22.“Workers Forced to Join Work,” Daily Star, April 25, 2013, http://archive.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/workers-forced-to-join-work.

  23.Mark Lincoln, “New Christchurch Earthquake Photos,” NZ Raw (blog), February 24, 2011, http://www.nzraw.co.nz/news/new-christchurch-earthquake-photos/.

  24.A good basic introduction to this material can be found at Charles J. Ammon, “Earthquake Effects,” Department of Geosciences, Penn State University, n.d., http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/IntroQuakes/Notes/earthquake_effects.html.

  25.The reason is that the speed at which earthquake waves travel depends on the material properties of the rocks through which they travel. More rigid rocks propagate energy at higher velocity. Loose soil is not rigid and propagates energy quite slowly. When a seismic wave that has been traveling through strong rocks encounters loose soil, it slows down, but because the wave carries the same amount of energy, the energy is concentrated in a smaller region, causing greater shaking. The energy piles up and increases the amplitude of shaking. The effect is quite like the way the height of a tsunami wave increases as the wave ente
rs shallow water near a coast. Areas of infill within solid rock regions can amplify shaking considerably. Because of this fact, considerable effort is put into seismic microzonation, in which soil properties are measured and maps are produced that show where the greatest shaking is likely to occur. Such measurements can guide first responders to areas most likely to be damaged in an earthquake and help planners in fortifying existing public structures and siting new ones.

  26.Suzanne Snively, “New Zealand Tops 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index,” Transparency International, December 3, 2013, http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/new_zealand_tops_2013_corruption_perceptions_index.

  27.This needs to be qualified a little. The polar regions are also not very productive because of the harsh environment. As in the tropics, wealth can be generated in such regions, but typically only through resource extraction.

  28.The latest annual report (2012–13) of the Institute of Seismological Research can be found at http://www.isr.gujarat.gov.in/images/pdf/APR%202012-13.pdf. I traveled with a colleague, Arthur Lerner-Lam, to Gujarat several times to advise the government on how to structure the institute in the two years before it was established.

  29.Generally, poor countries have much better systems in place to monitor the weather than to monitor earthquakes. Basic meteorological measurements are easier to make than seismic measurements and much less costly. As with the mapping of faults, colonial powers, especially Britain, installed weather stations and operated meteorological services in their colonies, because they knew local weather was important to the crops they wanted to produce and export. Typically colonial systems were established as replicas of systems that operated in the home country. Some British colonies, especially India, experienced devastating droughts and famines that were egregiously mismanaged by the colonizers, in part, one can suppose, because they had no experience of droughts of such massive scales. (An arresting account of the massive mismanagement and catastrophic death toll in Indian droughts can be found in Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis.)

  In many instances, when and if postcolonial countries established seismometer networks, they used the sites established for meteorological observations, and very often they attached their operations to whatever meteorological service existed. This made perfectly good sense from a management perspective. The sites were already prepared and visited routinely, and the same personnel could be trained to ensure the seismometers operated correctly. Unfortunately, an ideal site for a meteorological station may not be very suitable for seismic observations. In fact, the two have nothing at all to do with one another, and many seismometers that exist in poorer countries are less than ideally located.

  Today, extensive satellite observation systems available throughout the world are openly available to practically everyone, and there is little reason to be surprised by a bad weather event. Countries have very different capacities to receive and analyze this sort of information and rely on local readings from ground-based instruments. Those with high-level capacity often share information with regional neighbors that have less capability, although data sharing can be difficult with isolated states, such as Myanmar and North Korea. The meteorological office in India is quite sophisticated and has its own satellites. Bad weather scenarios, such as failure of the monsoon or droughts associated with El Niño, have devastating effects on the Indian economy, and weather forecasting has been of the highest priority in the country for more than a century. Although adjacent countries are equally affected by the weather, their capabilities are not as advanced as India’s.

  Chapter 3. Carnage in the Caribbean, Chaos in Concepción

  1.Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  2.P. Cockburn, “Haiti’s Elite Haunted by Fear of Revenge: Supporters of the Embattled Military Regime Dread a Bloody Repeat of 1791 When Tormented Slaves Massacred Their Rich Masters,” The Independent, July 18, 1994.

  3.Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review 26 (2004): 5–34.

  4.Pure Water for the World, “Transforming the Lives of Children & Families Struggling in Cité Soleil, Haiti,” 2015, http://purewaterfortheworld.org/our-projects-cite-soleil-1000-homes.html.

  5.CIA, The World Factbook: Haiti, March 11, 2015, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Several sources say Haiti is the most violent place on Earth. See Sudhir Muralidhar, “Gangs of Port-au-Prince,” The American Prospect, March 11, 2015, http://prospect.org/article/gangs-port-au-prince. The article quotes the UN as the source of that assessment without being specific about the UN agency that makes the assessment. Asger Leth’s documentary film Ghosts of Cité Soleil (A. Leth and M. Loncarevic, directors, 2007), documents life and death in the gangs of Port-au-Prince.

  8.Richard Sanders, “Chimère, the ‘N’ Word of Haiti,” Press for Conversion! no. 61 (2007): 50–51, http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/61/50-51.pdf.

  9.Athena R. Kolbe, “Revisiting Haiti’s Gangs and Organized Violence,” Humanitarian Action in Situations Other than War Discussion Paper 5 (2013): 1–36, http://hasow.org/uploads/trabalhos/101/doc/449921257.pdf; United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, “MINUSTAH Facts and Figures,” October 14, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/facts.shtml.

  10.UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, “MINUSTAH Facts and Figures.”

  11.Daniele Lantagne, G. Balakrish Nair, Claaudio F. Lanata, and Alejando Cravioto, “The Cholera in Haiti: Where and How Did It Begin?” Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, 2013. A good summary can be found at http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/uns-own-independent-experts-now-say-minustah-troops-most-likely-caused-cholera-epidemic.

  12.One measurement of inequality is Gini. Evans Jardotte has estimated that Haiti’s Gini coefficient is 0.6457. This coefficient runs from 0, which indicates perfect equality, to 1.0, representing maximum inequality. Only Namibia is more unequal than Haiti, according to Jardotte, although other sources place South Africa and several other African countries higher. The Gini is a statistical measure of income inequality derived by taking the difference between the actual distribution of incomes (modeled by a Lorenz function) and a hypothetical perfect equality, meaning that, for instance, 5 percent of the population holds 5 percent of the wealth, 20 percent holds 20 percent wealth, et cetera. Evans Jardotte, “Income Distribution and Poverty in the Republic of Haiti,” Partnership for Economic Policy—Poverty Monitoring, Measurement and Analysis, paper provided by PEP-PMMA in its series Working Papers PMMA with number 2006-13.

  13.Oxfam, “Working for the Few: Political Capture and Economic Inequality,” Oxfam Briefing Paper 178 (2014): 1–6, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-summ-en.pdf.

  14.World Bank, “Investing in People to Fight Poverty in Haiti,” Washington, DC, 2015, http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/Poverty%20documents/Haiti_PA_overview_web_EN.pdf.

  15.Deborah Sontag, “Years after Haiti Quake, Safe Housing Is a Dream for Many,” New York Times, August 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/world/americas/years-after-haiti-quake-safe-housing-is-dream-for-multitudes.html?_r=1.

  16.Manuel Roig-Franzia, Mary Beth Sheridan, and Michael E. Ruane, “Haitians Struggle to Find the Dead and Keep Survivors Alive after Earthquake,” Washington Post, January 15, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011401013.html.

  17.Maura R. O’Connor, “Two Years Later, Haitian Earthquake Death Toll in Dispute,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 12, 2012, http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/one_year_later_haitian_earthqu.php?page=all.

  18.Hans Jaap Melissen, “Haiti Quake Death Toll Well unde
r 100,000,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, February 23, 2010, http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/haiti-quake-death-toll-well-under-100,000.

  19.Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, “Haiti Earthquake PDNA: Assessment of Damage, Losses, General and Sectoral Needs,” World Bank, Washington, DC, March 24, 2010.

  20.World Health Organization, Division of Mental Health, Psychological Consequences of Disasters: Prevention and Management (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992).

  21.Timothy T. Schwartz, Yves-François Pierre, and Eric Calpas for LTL Strategies, Building Assessments and Rubble Removal in Quake-Affected Neighborhoods in Haiti (Washington, DC: USAID, 2011).

  22.Claude de Ville de Goyet, Juan Pablo Sarmiento, and François Grünewald, Health Response to the Earthquake in Haiti January 2010: Lessons to Be Learned for the Next Massive Sudden-Onset Disaster (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2011).

  23.Financial Tracking Service, “Haiti in 2013—Related Emergencies. List of Outstanding Pledges and Funding In 2013,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2013.

  24.Elizabeth Ferris, “Earthquakes and Floods: Comparing Haiti and Pakistan,” Brookings Institute, August 26, 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2010/8/26-earthquakes-floods-ferris/0826_earthquakes_floods_ferris.pdf.

  25.For more on this, see the paper I co-authored: Elisabeth King and John C. Mutter, “Violent Conflicts and Natural Disasters: The Growing Case for Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 7 (2014): 1239–55. It is rare for faults to exist in isolation. Typically, one main fault, such as the San Andreas, will be associated with numerous splays that originate from the main fault but cause dislocations far from it.

  26.Katz, The Big Truck That Went By. May 5, 2012.

  27.Vivian A. Bernal, and Paul Procee, “Four Years On: What China Got Right When Rebuilding after the Sichuan Earthquake,” East Asia & Pacific on the Rise (blog), World Bank, May 11, 2012, http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/four-years-on-what-china-got-right-when-rebuilding-after-the-sichuan-earthquake 5/11/2012.