Susan Kieffer, a geologist, reflects in this book about two kinds of disasters: “natural disasters” and “stealth disasters.” Natural disasters are the kind that happen suddenly – to take us out of geology and climate for a moment, these are the walking down the street and getting hit by a car disasters. They don’t happen often and, when they do, it is sudden and swift. Stealth disasters, on the other hand, are caused by human decisions, the heart attack following years of smoking, drinking, and eating fatty foods. To go back to the geologic/climate world: desertification after stripping topsoils and overgrazing; the collapse of aquifers that are depleted by the use of water to water lawns in desert communities; deforestation that contributes to floods and wildfires. In this book, Kieffer brings the two together: how do stealth disasters influence natural disasters. (To extend my metaphor, heart conditions can lead to cognitive decline, which could cause you to not notice an impaired driver or to wander into traffic.)

In other words, how does the kind of human-accelerated climate change impact natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanos. It is already clear that desertification along the African Sahara contributes to hurricanes that impact the Southeast and Eastern U.S. (just watch the weather report when they’re talking about early areas of disturbance – the weather patterns that travel across the Atlantic start with dust storms in Africa). We see the impact on droughts and flooding on the West Coast; dust storms across the Southwest; and floods and tornados of increased in magnitude and frequency across the Midwest.

The impact of these disasters is compounded by population growth: there are more people living in the line of disaster and, as we saw with Katrina, the ones who can afford to, often escape the path of the storm, and the ones who can’t, end up trapped in the Superdome. There’s a reason that tornados are attracted to trailer parks: they are often located in the most affordable (and least desirable) areas. The current housing shortage, as I’ve written before, is encouraging first time home buyers to settle on marginal lands, such as flood zones.

But, beyond that, the human scale of time makes it challenging to accept that a 100-year storm – or the 1000-year storm – doesn’t mean that it might strike any time in the next 100 or 1000 years – it means it has a 1 in 100 chance that it can strike tomorrow. And, if it struck yesterday, it still has a 1 in 100 chance that it will strike again tomorrow. South Florida, for example had a 1 in 1000 year rainstorm last year and just had another one. If meteorologists used the rules of Las Vegas, the odds of South Florida rainstorms would have changed based on the team’s recent performance. That doesn’t bode well for cities that have grown up around volcanos, like Naples. Or Seattle.

The challenge, Kieffer points out, is that, while we have recent and regular knowledge about how to handle certain kinds of disasters, such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, our knowledge of things that happen less-frequently or less-frequently at large scales is limited. We can add signage that illuminates flood and tsunami evacuation routes, shift to remote-schooling during blizzards, open cooling centers during heat waves, and set off tornado sirens to send people scurrying to basements. But huge urban areas haven’t experienced many volcanic eruptions and, as my former boss, a tank commander in Desert Storm, used to say, your planned battle strategy looks good on paper until the battle starts, then reality sets in and you have to adapt.

Would they be able to evacuate Seattle safely in a volcanic situation? That’s a lot of people. And what’s a safe distance away? In addition to Rainier, there’s also Baker and other dormant volcanos near by – would they be set off by Rainier’s behavior or would they be the ones to go first, and then where do you retreat to? Or would an eruption set off a Tsunami? And where would that hit? I am sure geologists at UW and WASU have done a lot of thinking about this, together with Washington State emergency management but it’s all theory until you find yourself in the middle of it, as anyone in the Northridge area in the 1990s will agree. And what of other events, like meteor strikes, that occur even less often?

We’ve done a remarkable amount of closing the barn door after the horse has left with air travel – adding metal detectors after disgruntled employees with guns took down planes and beefing up TSA after 9/11. We’ve done less well learning lessons from the spree killers who take out loved ones in their workplaces, along with colleagues, or decimate classrooms, movie theatres, churches, or shopping centers. We are not a species that learns lessons easily – we think we’re too smart, that we know better, that compromise is a slippery slope to some kind of loss of personal liberty. Okay, way off track now, where was I going with this? Oh yes, the book.

The author does not, as I did above, rue the human condition and our resistance toward pulling together for the greater good. Instead, she devotes her pages to a tour of disasters from around the world: earthquakes, landslides, volcanos, tsunamis, rogue waves, tornadoes, and the drought-flood cycle. She deftly explains the science using metaphors that make the complex seem simple. Along the way, she reflects on what we can learn from each type of disaster to help us prepare for local occurrences and / or disaster-preparedness in general. She wraps up with her thoughts on what we can do as a nation to become better prepared, so that we don’t suffer such losses when disasters do occur.

Just after 9/11, my sister – who lives in a small town that is so far off the map that no middle-eastern terrorist would ever have it on their hit list – began to experience panic attacks. What if she had to evacuate unexpectedly in the middle of the night? How would she gather everything together? She confided her fears to me, as I sat breathing in microparticles of people who used to live in my community. I told her we had recently been recommended to assemble a go-bag, a pre-packed bag with our passports, bottled water, dried or canned food, medications, extra clothing, and – for us – a supply of cat food. She said she’d feel silly, but she hid hers under her bed. Only then could she return to sleeping through the night.

One of my nephews and I share very little – but we do share a love of reading about disasters of various kinds. Perhaps this shows that we share a need to always be prepared, to mitigate risk.

If you share our love of reading about disasters, this is a good book for you.