Smash hit

So authorities treat people like potential mobs, keeping vital information from them and underestimating their abilities.

3. Disasters Affect Us All

Disasters are neither fair nor blind. Disasters have a strong prejudice against the poor. “I never fought a fire in a rich person’s home,” a veteran firefighter once told me. Fires are much more likely to happen in homes with shoddy construction, portable heaters and no working smoke detectors.

The same pattern holds globally. Developed nations experience about as many calamities as undeveloped nations. The difference is in the death toll. Of all the people who died from disasters from 1985 to 1999, 65 percent came from nations with incomes below $760 per capita, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, for example, approached the intensity of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. But the Northridge earthquake killed only 63 people. The Pakistan earthquake killed about 100,000.

4. “Natural” Disasters

I don’t know of many major disasters that were truly “natural”—in the sense that the scale of destruction was inevitable. Hurricane Katrina was predicted—in painstaking detail—by scientists, newspapers and emergency officials years in advance There was absolutely nothing surprising about it—except perhaps that the number of actual casualties was smaller than most of the estimates.

More powerful storms had struck New Orleans before. The difference was that we had changed the way we lived. We had overdeveloped the coastal area, stripping the land of natural buffers like wetlands and trees.

Even the tsunami in southeast Asia could have been a far smaller tragedy, had the Indian Ocean had a tsunami warning system like the Pacific Ocean—and had people known the basic warning signs of a tsunami.

5. Strength is a Virtue

Sometimes, it helps to be strong. But usually, it is better to be wise. For example, men were more likely to survive the 2004 tsunami in many places—largely because they were more likely to know how to swim in many cultures.

Conversely, men are more likely to die in floods and storms. A study of U.S. thunderstorm-related deaths from 1994 to 2000 found that men were more than twice as likely to die than women. That is partly because men are less likely to evacuate early—and more likely to try to walk or drive through water.

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