Gilbert F. White
We responded to a university invitation to come out and join the institute. I
was first invited to be just a professor in the institute. Then, at the last
minute, they lost a director and asked me to take that post. I did. After I'd
been here a little while I became much interested in an interdisciplinary effort
to look at research on natural hazards in a broad context. This built on what
Ian Burton, Bob Kates, and other geographers and I had learned from
studying floods and droughts and applying it to other kinds of natural hazards.
Those perturbations from extreme events included earthquakes, hurricanes,
landslides, tornadoes, lightning. With Eugene Haas from the Department of
Sociology, we obtained an NSF grant to do an assessment of research on
natural hazards, which later led to the NSF establishing a research program
in that field.
Q: Is the methodology transferable?
A: I think it is. There are obvious limitations and one needs to be sensitive to
those. It's entirely clear that in the earthquake field the Office of
Management and Budget set up a group to look at earthquakes in the same
way we had looked at floods earlier. The kind of research that then began to
be carried on about earthquakes followed the lines of the research that had
been started on floods in terms of land use, problems of warning systems,
applicability of insurance programs, areas of seismic vulnerability, and the
like. I think the best test of there being something that can be learned from
comparing the experience in one natural hazard field with another field is that
the Natural Hazards Workshop which NSF helped start and fund to get people
to attend in the first year now operates without any financial support beyond
putting together the program. The federal agencies themselves pay for the
center. The people who attend the workshop come at their own and their
agencies' expense. People apparently think they're getting something
worthwhile out of it. It is a rare example of carefully organized, periodic
communication between producers and users of research in a field having
large policy implications.
Q: I guess what I don't understand is the methodology that you're applying to
various natural disasters and natural hazards. Why can `t the methodology y,
whatever it is, also be applicable to human hazards, like fires in a city or
something of that sort? What is there unique about natural hazards versus
human hazards in terms of assessing probabilities, the amount of damage,
etc. ?
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