Man & Nature

As Japan reels under a devastating hat-trick of Earth, Sea & Technology, I cannot help ponder how our fate lies in the crevice between what we know and what we think we know.  Maybe that’s the best we can hope for and resign ourselves to strive for some optimization of survival, not a guarantee.

We know about the “Ring of Fire,” plate tectonics, the hydrodynamics of massive bodies of water and the thermodynamics of nuclear fission.  We think we know about the probability distribution—in magnitude and frequency—of sudden perturbations from the equilibrium state and design protections to match those probabilities.  We know any probability model will anticipate outliers (extreme events) with little precision and think we know that a rational analysis of risk will minimize catastrophic consequences.

We use terms like “natural disaster” and “human error” as mutually exclusive concepts and our hindsight is acute when it comes to the latter.  At Three Mile Island and Chernobyl human (operator) error was the origin of a cascade of predictable events.  We can pinpoint the source and whack that mole; another pops up of course.

Not so in northeast Japan, or for that matter with Katrina, where human decisions in the cause/effect stream lie in the feeder springs not at the cataracts. We settled and built a city below sea level in the path of tropical storms.  We engineered a series of levees, dykes, pumping stations and above ground canals to service and protect our settlement. Our designs were based on a spectrum of expectations and addressed the most probable, not the worst possible, of these.  That is, I suppose “human nature.”

We built a nuclear power plant on a coastline parallel to (not straddling) a major fault and thus in the bulls eye of a hydraulic event propagated perpendicular a thrust type quake.  We engineered an impressive array of “safeguards” which, if we were scoring, would place us in the upper percentiles of some standard test, while failing the course. The infamous Mark 1 reactor and ancillary equipment survived the quake—Japan’s most severe in 1000 years—as designed.  The reactor scrammed (as designed), emergency generators started automatically (as designed) maintaining cooling pump operation (as designed).  If that were all nature threw at us, we would still be standing in awe of its power and lamenting the tragedy while nodding smugly at our foresight in the face of its fury.

However, the second punch of the combination was a haymaker.  A 30 ft. tsunami turned towns, villages, ports and thousands of human souls into a macabre swamp of flotsam & jetsam.  It topped the 30 ft. “tsunami wall” in Miyako because the northeast coastline had dropped three feet, and overran the 18 ft. walls at the at the Fukushima nuclear plant demolishing the free-standing (diesel) fuel tanks—which had withstood the quake (as designed).  Without fuel, emergency electrical supply was fatally compromised, eliminating the ability to maintain reactor cooling and mitigate flooding of the emergency generator compartments themselves.  Third source, battery back-up would only last 8 hours.  Ironically these emergency generator fuel tanks in the U.S. are now hardened, not in anticipation of tsunamis but in response to 9/11.  It’s the “thought of everything” fallacy that is the Achilles Heel.

Whenever I’m tempted to conclude I’ve “thought of everything” I slap myself with a story I was told many years ago.  I was in Sweden a few months after that country had converted its traffic laws from left-hand to right-hand drive.  They had prepared for the crossover event (H-Day it was called for some reason) for years.  At the appointed hour all but emergency traffic was banned, the army & local police forces were in the streets, right-hand signs were uncovered, those facing the other way covered and traffic lights were reconfigured.  A latest generation of ambidextrous trams simply loaded & unloaded from the other side.  It worked so well that in the months that followed H-Day, traffic accidents actually decreased.  They had thought of everything…everything that is except the seeing-eye dogs trained to look right.  It took a few casualties to realize that omission.

We make the distinction between “natural” and “man-made” as if our species were not a part of nature.  That is understandable as from our perspective nature is on the other side of the ocular window.  While simultaneously considering ourselves subservient to, or master of, nature, it remains outside.  It is hard to think otherwise, to relegate human nature a subset of nature-at-large.  As humbling (humiliating?) as that is, maybe all disasters are natural in some sense, even when human error is an immediate or remote factor. 

I reckon that to the extraterrestrial observer, the difference between a beaver dam and the Hoover Dam, between a beehive and the Trump Towers, is not a matter of intent, just a matter of scale.

 

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