Review of The Blessings of Disaster: The Lessons That Catastrophes Teach Us and Why Our Future Depends on It by Michel Bruneau

This new book from State University of New York (SUNY) professor of engineering Michel Bruneau shows how our societies often take one step forward—discovering ways to make structures more resilient to earthquakes and hurricanes, for example—while taking two steps back—not requiring such upgrades in building codes. Despite his own extensive record of highly cited and highly technical peer-reviewed engineering publications, this book is free from jargon, equations, and tables of numbers. It uses a jaunty style alongside personal anecdotes to illustrate core arguments throughout, setting up a quite readable (and sometimes funny) narrative. I appreciated his gallery of horrible earthquake movies (p. 123) along with stories of his fieldwork in a variety of disaster hotspots.

We live in an era of disasters and, because of climate change, their frequency and impact will continue to increase. In 2022 alone, economic losses from shocks and crises were more than $220 billion, with $40 billion due to floods alongside 16,000 excess deaths from heat waves in Europe alone. More than 100 million people were displaced across the world due to wars, famine, and other shocks, some 1% of the world’s population. And, despite its wealth and prominence, the United States has no exception in terms of vulnerability. Since 1980, the United States has gone through nearly 350 disasters that have done more than $2.5 trillion in damage.

Given the ubiquity of disaster and the overwhelming evidence that everyone—rich and poor, those living in coastal areas and arid plains, city and rural dwellers alike—will likely face a shock, we seem powerless to make ourselves less vulnerable and more resilient. Societies often enact public policies too late, and when they do put money into managing shocks, they invest in programs that put us back in the same at-risk position. Politicians typically wait for a massive disaster and its tragic consequences before they discover the political will to act. Then disaster risk reduction public policies often backfire, putting more at risk. The United States, for example, has long subsidized flood zone insurance, reducing the costs for people to build homes and live in flood plains. By shrinking the costs for people to own homes near rivers and coasts, taxpayer dollars simultaneously incentivize building in such dangerous areas and then rebuilding after they are damaged by floods. Governments at all levels have failed to put consistent standards in place to prepare buildings for the floods and earthquakes sure to come.

Bruneau divides his book into three sections. The opening 11 chapters set the stage by laying out a variety of natural hazards and human-made risks, including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, volcanos, and terror attacks. The middle section looks at individual and institutional factors that make us so bad at preparing ourselves and our communities for future shocks. The last section looks to the future to answer the question, as the author asks wryly, “Are we doomed?” (p. xi). Humanity’s potential futures include climate change, nuclear war, and overpopulation.

The monograph’s power comes from Bruneau’s exhaustive knowledge of policy and engineering. In his chapter “The Water Magnet,” he explains that while a handful of coastal homeowners have invested additional money—some 15% to 20% more than standard costs (p. 57)—to build homes with elevated first floors, reinforced concrete walls and floors, and hurricane-proof windows, these investments are not mandatory in all coastal regions (p. 51). In fact, in the state facing the most devastating hurricanes over the 20th and 21st century, politicians have worried that imposing stricter building codes would hurt their political chances and discourage new building in the area. So, the Florida legislature “did not impose those [stricter] requirements along the entire state coastline” (p. 56). It should not surprise readers to learn that many large property insurers have pulled out of the state as it has repetitively faced hurricanes and flooding and building codes remain subpar. And for those hoping that other state legislatures would have an interest in mandatory statewide building codes, Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, Illinois, and Alabama lack them (p. 250). Even though an international building code has been in existence since 1994 (p. 249), “there is no national US building code” (p. 245), so “what each small jurisdiction will do is up to them” (p. 250).

If legislatures will not create and enforce stricter building codes to keep people and their property safe, an observer might wonder, at least they could—like the New Zealand government after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011—prevent people from moving into vulnerable areas. The political backlash in the US could be deep, as “[p]rohibiting homes in floodplains would block 47,000 square miles” (p. 63). In the United States, rather than banning new construction, the National Flood Insurance Program helps people move to vulnerable areas (p. 65). The book points out that another approach to keeping people safe—buying out homes in coastal areas that will be underwater soon—has been “slow and expensive with limited success” so that only 3,000 of 64,000 flooded properties have been bought out so far in Harris County near Houston (p. 64).

Much of the book shows how individual-level decision-making combined with political incentives for elected officials mean that transformational change to reduce disaster risks is hard to find. Several barriers keep us from being able to evaluate our risks accurately. We deny the likelihood of a future shock, perhaps because acknowledging risks would push us to spend more money to make residents and residences safer (p. 139). We procrastinate, hoping future generations will move to act (p. 214). And when politicians move, it is almost always after a shock, despite evidence that investing $1 up front saves $4 to $13 down the line. The pattern is, as Bruneau identifies, “in response, in response, in response” (p. 152) rather than limiting our exposure to risks ahead of time. Because politicians want projects that show tangible benefits and resonate with the people (p. 227), public policies may do more harm than good.

The book underscores the challenges for individuals to make good choices and the importance for them to trust their decision makers. Bruneau recognizes that trust must be earned (p. 237) and that poor government responses to shocks—like Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdowns—erode trust (p. 93). He also has a clear-eyed vision of the incentives that drive less than optimal political responses to shocks. But I hoped to see more at the mesolevel, that of community, neighborhood, and social network. My own research (Aldrich 2012, 2019) has shown the power of residents to not only mitigate the impact of shocks but to help design better responses to future crises, and we see little of that here.

This book provides a readable, deeply informed window into the reasons why we cycle through disaster after disaster with little meaningful transformation of our regulations or our risk reduction strategies.