Your Survival Blog
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Preparedness: a weighty issue?
I recently blitzed through Amanda Ripley’s very readable The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why. It’s an excellent book, but I stopped cold while reading the appendix called “How to Boost Your Survival Odds.” You see, one of Ripley’s six survival tips is “Lose Weight”:
I hate to nag, but there is no workaround here. The harsh truth is that obese people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries such as heart attacks, and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. There is no need to say much more, since there are entire industries devoted to this particularly modern and maddening challenge. But it’s worth remembering that on 9/11, people with low physical ability were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the towers. Once again, what helps us in regular life helps us in disasters.
I’ve heard enough from friends with weight issues that this passage immediately struck me as wrongheaded. So I ran it by a few of them to check.
I can’t improve much on their comments:
“When someone claims to be putting forth a ‘harsh truth’, I automatically expect them to be putting forth a prejudice they hope to not be called upon to justify by announcing in advance that it is the truth. I’ll just run right out and tell all the obese people I know who are runners, dancers, choreographers, and rock climbers that they should really try to develop some physical ability, shall I?”
“While there are correlations with weight, it’s not a 1:1 mapping, and in an emergency it doesn’t matter why someone has trouble moving (other than to let the survivors feel better or worse about whatever happens to them). Nor do I think that lowering one’s prospects of dying in a rare disaster is likely to be a particularly powerful motivator for anyone inclined to be overweight.”
“‘Get in better shape’, where practical, is generically good advice. But then, so is ‘make ten million dollars’, which would make any number of disaster preparation steps easier.”
“I get the impression that there’s a widely-held sense among those without the inclination — or with the sort of low-level, need-to-lose-five-pounds issue that can be dealt with with minimal lifestyle changes — that the problem is somehow that overweight people didn’t realize there were any disadvantages to being fat, or that it had anything to do with what they ate or, to a lesser extent, how much activity they engaged in. Ripley may be in a similar position: ‘But if they knew they’d be more likely to be burned alive by Al Qaeda, maybe then they’d stop their incomprehensible eating and activity habits.’ There are really very few obese people who couldn’t name ten reasons they’d rather be thinner. Increasing social stigma and the wide trumpeting of health risks are demonstrably no match for the wide availability of cheap, tasty food; I seriously doubt that adding another, fairly uncommon risk to the list is likely to make a significant difference.”
“As an overweight person, I think that the biggest issue here is the conflation of obesity and ‘low physical ability’. There are plenty of people out there who are clinically overweight, who nonetheless have very good strength, agility and endurance, if not speed. I would seriously question if Ripley has any hard data to back up her blanket comments about obese people healing more slowly, or being at higher risk for heart attack in a disaster. Just to put things into perspective, while I’m way heavier than I should be now, I also know that I was 30+ pounds outside the ‘overweight’ categorization for my height when I was playing on the varsity soccer team in high school. There’s a definite undercurrent of ‘thinner is better’ out there in the world, I just don’t buy it, and frankly there’s a lot of medical data turning up that flies in the face of straight BMI statistics.”
One friend referred to the “elephant in the room”: “if you are somehow differently-abled and disaster strikes, by Ripley’s guidelines, you are f***ed.” He agreed with me that “the right place to focus might be on maximizing overall fitness and mobility for the person you are, rather than on reducing BMI.”
“Yeah,” responded another friend, “talk about mobility and maybe about helps for disabled people who need to evacuate when the elevators go out. And maybe nudge all of us to improve our mobility the best we can.”
I’m with them. What do you think?
Posted by eks on 05/27 at 10:27 PM(8) Comments • Permalink
Friday, May 14, 2010
Gather Ye… Not
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying:/
And this same flower that smiles to-day/ To-morrow will be dying.
—Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” we’ve all heard. Most people don’t know the poem the line is from, which is somewhat jarring to modern ears (it’s about marrying before you’re old and ugly). But think of this line in a context of emergency preparedness.
The time to gather rosebuds is while “the glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting.” The time to gather is not — and let us get away from Herrick for a moment — when storm clouds are gathering on the horizon. And it is most definitely not when the flames are licking at your neighbor’s door.
Gathering is a common human response to disaster. A depressing number of plane-crash survivors try to lug their carry-ons down the aisle while exiting, even when begged not to by the flight crew; often these people’s attachments to their laptops or spare underwear prevents fellow passengers from getting out in the ninety seconds after the crash (often the window before the plane catches on fire or sinks), costing others their lives. A survey of World Trade Center survivors found that two out of every five spent time trying to collect items before evacuating the towers; presumably the percentage was higher among those who didn’t make it out in time.
People’s attachments to their toothbrushes or their current paperback novels might seem inexplicable in the face of really horrific events, but it’s a normal response to disaster, a way of making sense of events. But it might kill you. So before catastrophe comes to you or your neighborhood, just remember: don’t gather.
If you think you “can’t” live without the family Bible, your prize collectible, or the slides of your child’s kindergarten graduation, then put those at the top of your home evacuation plan, and do one of the following:
- put them in your actual evacuation bag, before you need it.
- make copies of anything irreplaceable and store those in your evac bag.
- put that priceless painting or Ming vase by the door you expect to leave by, and grab it as you run through the door.
But keep in mind that you may not even be home when the wildfire or earthquake hits. If you have sentimental items that can be duplicated, like a photo album, make copies and keep them somewhere else — perhaps in a safe-deposit box out of state, or at a relative’s home in another town. And think about letting go of any material objects in case of a major catastrophe.
Do not, for the love of all you care about, risk yourself during an actual evacuation. During a plane crash, take nothing (except essential medication). During a home or work evacuation, take only your preplanned bug-out bags. If you haven’t already planned for the love letters you wrote in college to go along when you escape your house, don’t go back for them. Sentimental items — photo albums, baby shoes, your wedding veil — are not worth your life.
Posted by eks on 05/14 at 09:51 AMThen be not coy, but use your time ...
You may for ever tarry.
(2) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came
Eastern North America gets hurricanes. Half the year is officially “hurricane season” — the beginning of June to end of November — because the overwhelming majority of hurricanes occur in those months. (The end of the season used to be considered October, but in the twentieth century too many hurricanes wandered along in November, so the official crew expanded the definition.) Most hurricanes and tropical storms, in fact, are bunched together in just three months, August through October; the beginning of September is the worst.
The western coast of North America has a similar season, mid-May through the end of November.
Other areas of the world have their own seasons. East Asia gets typhoons all year, though with a peak in late summer; India has two peaks six months apart; the Southern Hemisphere regions tend to have seasons like North America’s, only in reverse — November to May.
In the North Atlantic, 2008 was a well-above-average year, with 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, five major hurricanes; never before, since records have been kept, had there been a major Atlantic hurricane in July, August, September, October AND November. The worst year on record was 2005: 28 named storms, fifteen hurricanes, seven major hurricanes — and four of those Category 5, the worst sort of all.
In comparison, 2009 began with a fizzle, with no named storms in June or July. (El Niño in the Pacific, say meteorologists, is shifting the jet stream south and disrupting storm formation.) Of course, 1992 started sluggishly as well — yet the very first named storm, Hurricane Andrew in August 1992, brought a gigantic swath of destruction.
June too soon.
July stand by.
August look out you must.
September remember.
October all over.
—R. Inwards, 1898
By contrast, tornadoes don’t quite have a “season,” at least in the US, where weather conditions have proved favorable to tornadoes year-round. They do, however, have peak seasons, depending on the state: in the Northeast, June through August; in California, January through April; in the Gulf states, spring with another peak in November; in the Midwest’s Tornado Alley, the spring or early summer, becoming later as you move north.
Last June, storm-chasing scientists announced that the 2009 tornado season had been a disappointment, with fewer tornadoes and less intense ones than in previous years to date; there was even a 17-day stretch in late spring with no tornado watches anywhere in the US. This may have been bad news for thrill junkies, you might think, but isn’t the good news that many fewer people died in tornadoes than the preceding year?
On the other hand, the storm chasers — from four countries and a wide array of institutions — weren’t doing it just for thrills, they were hoping to apply their instruments to tornadoes to see exactly what made them develop, and what happened when they did. (The experiment is called VORTEX2: Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2. It had ten million dollars in funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation, and will return during the spring of 2010.) Among their goals was to see whether warning times — now less than fifteen minutes — could be expanded to half an hour or even a full hour.
Oddly enough, NOAA records show that there were not significantly fewer tornadoes in 2009 than in the previous several years. It’s possible the VORTEX2 crew put out their instruments during a lull, or were simply looking in the wrong spots. It’ll be an interesting project to watch....
Posted by eks on 05/05 at 07:42 AM(0) Comments • Permalink