The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.

Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…

As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.

Amazon

I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.

It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.