Floods: Familiarity helps
A colleague at work told me about a flood she had been in as a 5-year-old child. Her tale really highlights the value of familiarity and having reasonable infrastructure in place.
For her, the flood was actually fun. She has no memory of trauma surrounding it, even though it lasted 35 days. (Yep, over a month).
You see, she is from India, and for a while her civil-servant father was stationed in a city near the banks of the Ganges. Floods aren't that uncommon, and sure enough, one time the river overflowed and inundated the town. But no one evacuated (in her words, where would we go?). Houses there are built of concrete, so there was little structural damage. People went upstairs and lived on the second floor, or the roof. They used their couple of hours of warning time to move precious items onto the upper floor, and to set up a kitchen and get the pantry items in order.
Everyone keeps a supply of potatoes, rice, and daal. You can live on that for a long time.
I asked if they had access to water, to any other food, or to medical items. She said a helicopter came every couple of days, organized by the local government, and brought them what they needed. People hung out, traveled around by boat, and generally took a vacation until the waters receded. In her case, it was the four people in her family, their dog, and two servants living on the second floor of their house.
And they had a huge guava tree in the front yard that apparently just loved all the extra water. It began to flourish, and my friend was able to reach over from the roof and pick the guavas from the top branches of the tree during the flood. What a treat!
Now, we shouldn't be naive about the people who didn't have 2-story houses or adequate access to shelter. There was certainly some suffering. Natural disasters in places like India can potentially kill many thousands of people, just like happened in New Orleans. And often the aftereffects of disease and displaced people are just as severe, if not more so.
But note also the enormous difference in attitude. They actually just dealt with the flood as it was. No panic, no sense of wrongness from God, no huge psychological trauma about losing some of their physical possessions or not being able to go to work for a month. And the local government responded to their needs because it was familiar with these circumstances.
People talk about how increasingly heavy weather and other natural phenomena from global warming are going to lead to chaos and disrupted civilization. I don't buy it. I think when people get used to things, they adapt, and no longer panic.
For her, the flood was actually fun. She has no memory of trauma surrounding it, even though it lasted 35 days. (Yep, over a month).
You see, she is from India, and for a while her civil-servant father was stationed in a city near the banks of the Ganges. Floods aren't that uncommon, and sure enough, one time the river overflowed and inundated the town. But no one evacuated (in her words, where would we go?). Houses there are built of concrete, so there was little structural damage. People went upstairs and lived on the second floor, or the roof. They used their couple of hours of warning time to move precious items onto the upper floor, and to set up a kitchen and get the pantry items in order.
Everyone keeps a supply of potatoes, rice, and daal. You can live on that for a long time.
I asked if they had access to water, to any other food, or to medical items. She said a helicopter came every couple of days, organized by the local government, and brought them what they needed. People hung out, traveled around by boat, and generally took a vacation until the waters receded. In her case, it was the four people in her family, their dog, and two servants living on the second floor of their house.
And they had a huge guava tree in the front yard that apparently just loved all the extra water. It began to flourish, and my friend was able to reach over from the roof and pick the guavas from the top branches of the tree during the flood. What a treat!
Now, we shouldn't be naive about the people who didn't have 2-story houses or adequate access to shelter. There was certainly some suffering. Natural disasters in places like India can potentially kill many thousands of people, just like happened in New Orleans. And often the aftereffects of disease and displaced people are just as severe, if not more so.
But note also the enormous difference in attitude. They actually just dealt with the flood as it was. No panic, no sense of wrongness from God, no huge psychological trauma about losing some of their physical possessions or not being able to go to work for a month. And the local government responded to their needs because it was familiar with these circumstances.
People talk about how increasingly heavy weather and other natural phenomena from global warming are going to lead to chaos and disrupted civilization. I don't buy it. I think when people get used to things, they adapt, and no longer panic.
