I live in “hurricane country”, the coastal low country of South Carolina, and eighteen miles south of the official designated landfall of 1989’s hurricane Hugo. As it happens Hugo was a storm much like what Gustav is forecast to be when it makes landfall.
For those who have never experienced a major hurricane it might be hard to imagine the feeling one experiences while they watch a powerful storm take aim for the area they call home. It becomes even more psychologically difficult if while you are watching that storm approach you also have fresh personal memories of exactly what a major hurricane is capable of doing.
Unfortunately, there are lessons that sometimes one must live through to learn, but once learned will undoubtably better prepare you to face a similar situation in the future. The officials and residents of New Orleans learned a lot of lessons wrapped up by one big one.
A simple lesson this “big one” is, but it is the most valuable and important: there are many things that must be done before hand even if it means doing them for what may end up being a false alarm. Preparations and actions cannot wait until the danger is known to be an unambiguous fact because doing them takes time. Of course, it also takes having an action plan in place along with the necessary “things” and “human resources” to carry it out. It’s a great big choreographed dance of coordinated semi-chaos.
The similarities between a major hurricane and a severe pandemic are many, as well as similarities to prestaged planning and preparations. Of course, one of the glaring differences is a hurricane destroys homes, community infrastructure, and things with relatively few human victims. A severe pandemic, on the other hand, will leave physical structures and infrastructure alone for the most part but will strike some statistical portion of the people of a community and some statistical portion of those will die.
This time around the citizens and officials of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the US federal government are doing the things that need to be done in the face of a threat from a major hurricane. This time around they had meaningful plans in order to do those things that need to be done when time is short and tasks are many.
Those of us who watch avian influenza, and H5N1 specifically, don’t always agree on what the future may hold nor what should be done in preparation now to face that uncertain possibility, and that, unlike watching a major hurricane approach, makes a pandemic all the harder to prepare for. While there is an operative consensus in New Orleans’ pre-landfall actions and the reasons underpinning them, there is no such consensus for a pandemic.
The world exists in a “pre-Katrina” and “post swine flu” state of awareness and threat appreciation when it comes to pandemics, when the “false alarm” is more often than not the thing that informs actionable opinion. New Orleans remembered all the false alarms before Katrina as well, and those false alarms weighed heavily in what residents and officials did (or didn’t do) in preparation.
Although they have not forgotten all those previous false alarms, post Katrina New Orleans knows that by the time Gustav would be a “certain threat” the clock will have run out on many of the critical things necessary to guard and maintain dignity and physical well being. Letting the clock run out isn’t worth it to those in New Orleans facing Gustav, and while I’m confident all is not going according to plan, and all is not going flawlessly perfect, at least this time the need to be “proactive” is well understood, even if it’s all for a false alarm.
Unlike Gustav’s well plotted future timeline with its finite window for being proactive, a future pandemic has no such plot. It could be next week, or the next decade, or even never, making a future pandemic a true false alarm. As inaction was acceptable in a “pre-Katrina” New Orleans, inaction is acceptable in the pre-pandemic phase we find ourselves in. And, just like in a “post-Katrina” New Orleans, what was acceptable pre-event will be viewed in hind sight critically and with condemnation should a pandemic befall us.
I will watch Gustav from a safe and physically uninvolved distance with gratitude for that distance, but thinking about my safe [this time] location reminded me that in a severe pandemic there will be no such thing as geographically safe. I will also be mindful that even an unknown timeline is still finite with unknown points along its trajectory.
SZ
