When Disaster Strikes - Part 8: Why We Forget

The Eternal Return

In 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 6,000-12,000 people—the deadliest natural disaster in American history.

In response, Galveston built a seawall and raised the grade of the entire city. These measures worked: subsequent hurricanes caused far less damage.

But the lessons didn’t spread. A century later, New Orleans faced Hurricane Katrina with levees known to be inadequate, with no evacuation plan for those without cars, with emergency response systems that had been dismantled and underfunded.

The information existed. The warnings had been issued. The vulnerabilities were documented. Yet when the storm came, the city was unprepared—not because no one knew better, but because the knowledge had been lost, ignored, or deliberately set aside.

This is the puzzle of disaster amnesia: why, despite repeated catastrophes, do societies fail to learn?

The Political Economy of Forgetting

Forgetting is not neutral. It serves interests. Understanding whose interests helps explain why forgetting persists.

Development Interests

After every disaster, there are calls to restrict development in vulnerable areas. Build further from the coast. Avoid flood zones. Require stronger construction.

These proposals threaten real estate interests. Land in hazardous areas is often valuable precisely because of the hazard—oceanfront property, riverside lots, areas with views of volcanic mountains.

Restricting development reduces property values, limits construction profits, and angers landowners. These interests are concentrated and organized. They lobby against restrictions, fund campaigns of politicians who support development, and work to ensure that post-disaster restrictions are temporary.

The result is predictable: restrictions adopted after disaster are weakened over time, and development proceeds in vulnerable areas until the next disaster.

Insurance and Moral Hazard

Government disaster assistance creates moral hazard. If losses will be compensated, the incentive to avoid risk diminishes.

The National Flood Insurance Program, created after repeated flood disasters, has been criticized for subsidizing development in flood zones. Property owners build in hazardous areas knowing that insurance (often federally subsidized) will cover losses. Taxpayers bear the risk while developers and property owners capture the gains.

This system has beneficiaries: developers who profit from construction, property owners who enjoy oceanfront living, insurers who collect premiums with federal backing. These beneficiaries have incentives to maintain the system—and to resist reforms that would make development in hazardous areas more costly.

Political Cycles

Disaster response is politically visible. Politicians who respond effectively to immediate crisis receive credit. Politicians who invest in long-term prevention receive little credit—until the disaster that didn’t happen fails to materialize.

This asymmetry distorts incentives. Political attention focuses on response, not prevention. Recovery spending is popular; mitigation spending is not.

The political cycle also means turnover. The officials who experienced a disaster and learned its lessons leave office. Their successors, without that experience, may not prioritize what seems like a historical concern.

Competing Priorities

Political attention is finite. Disaster preparedness must compete with healthcare, education, economic development, defense, and countless other priorities.

After disaster, preparedness briefly claims attention. But as time passes, attention shifts to more immediate concerns. The budget for levee maintenance is cut to fund schools. Emergency management staff are redirected to other duties. Disaster preparedness drops down the priority list.

This isn’t malicious—it’s structural. The threats that dominate attention are those that are immediate and visible. Probabilistic future disasters are neither.

The Industry of Disaster

Some industries profit from disaster—and have incentives to maintain the conditions that produce repeated catastrophe.

The Reconstruction Industry

Every disaster creates reconstruction demand. Construction companies, materials suppliers, and contractors profit from rebuilding.

This creates perverse incentives. A construction industry that depends on disaster reconstruction has no interest in prevention. If levees were properly maintained, if buildings were earthquake-resistant, if development were restricted from flood zones—the reconstruction industry would shrink.

This isn’t conspiracy—it’s economics. Industries that depend on disaster have structural incentives to oppose prevention. They may not actively cause disasters, but they don’t lobby for the policies that would prevent them.

The Relief Industry

Humanitarian relief is big business. Major disasters mobilize billions in aid, flowing through contractors, NGOs, and international agencies.

This creates organizations whose existence depends on disaster. These organizations may genuinely want to help—but they also have institutional interests in maintaining their role.

The professionalization of disaster response has created career paths that depend on repeated catastrophe. People whose jobs exist because of disasters have complex incentives regarding prevention.

Political Opportunity

Disasters are politically useful. They create opportunities for visible leadership, for emergency spending, for reconstruction contracts that can be steered to supporters.

Politicians who derive advantage from disaster response have ambivalent incentives about prevention. A disaster narrowly averted generates no headlines; a disaster responded to effectively creates political capital.

This doesn’t mean politicians want disasters. But it does mean the political system doesn’t strongly reward prevention—and may weakly prefer response to a disaster that could have been prevented.

Mechanisms of Amnesia

How does disaster knowledge get lost? Several mechanisms operate.

Institutional Memory Loss

Organizations that hold disaster knowledge—emergency management agencies, planning departments, public works—experience turnover. Staff who lived through disasters retire. New employees lack experiential knowledge.

Documents exist, but institutional knowledge is more than documents. It’s the understanding that comes from experience, the relationships that enable action, the judgment about what matters.

When this knowledge walks out the door, organizations become vulnerable. They have procedures but not understanding. They can follow protocols but can’t adapt when situations diverge from expectations.

Budget Cuts

Disaster preparedness is expensive. Maintaining levees, stockpiling supplies, training responders, updating plans—all of this costs money.

These costs are visible and immediate. The benefits—disasters that don’t happen or that cause less damage—are invisible and uncertain.

When budgets are tight, preparedness is often cut. The cuts may seem small—deferring maintenance, reducing staff, delaying updates. But cumulative cuts over years create vulnerability.

The years without disaster seem to validate the cuts. If we reduced the emergency management budget and nothing bad happened, perhaps the spending was unnecessary? This reasoning ignores probability—the disaster that didn’t happen this year may happen next year.

Generational Turnover

Disaster memory is personal. Those who lived through catastrophe carry knowledge that shapes their behavior.

But memory doesn’t transfer across generations. Those who weren’t present don’t carry the visceral understanding of what disaster means. They know abstractly that hurricanes are dangerous, but they don’t know in the way that survivors know.

As disaster recedes in time, fewer people carry personal memory. The warnings of survivors seem alarmist to those who’ve never experienced the event. Risk perception declines as experiential knowledge fades.

Active Erasure

Sometimes forgetting is deliberate. Interests that benefit from forgetting work to suppress disaster memory.

After the Bhopal chemical disaster in 1984, Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) worked to minimize attention, settle lawsuits quickly and quietly, and avoid ongoing liability. The company had no interest in keeping Bhopal in public memory.

Similar dynamics operate with less dramatic disasters. Industries responsible for contamination, companies that cut corners on safety, developers who built in hazardous areas—all have incentives to promote forgetting.

Memory Maintenance

Keeping disaster lessons alive requires active effort—effort that often doesn’t happen.

Memorials and Monuments

Physical memorials can maintain disaster memory. The 9/11 Memorial, the Oklahoma City Memorial, the various Holocaust memorials—these keep events in public consciousness.

But most disasters don’t get memorials. The Galveston hurricane, despite its death toll, has modest commemoration. The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, which killed thousands, is largely forgotten.

Memorials require resources and political will. Disasters that affect the powerful and well-organized get memorialized. Disasters that affect the marginalized are more likely to be forgotten.

Archives and Documentation

Historical records preserve disaster knowledge. But archives require maintenance, organization, and accessibility. Old records deteriorate, get lost, or become inaccessible as formats change.

Digital preservation should make this easier, but digital systems have their own vulnerabilities. File formats become obsolete, links break, platforms disappear.

Active curation is required to keep disaster knowledge accessible—and curation requires resources that are often lacking.

Narrative and Culture

Stories preserve memory more effectively than documents. A flood that becomes part of community narrative—told and retold, shaping identity—is remembered longer than a flood that’s only recorded in archives.

But cultural memory is selective. Some events become central to community narrative; others fade. The selection reflects power: whose stories get told, whose experiences are considered important.

Marginalized communities whose disasters are not incorporated into dominant narratives face compounded erasure. Not only do they experience disasters disproportionately—their disasters are disproportionately forgotten.

Institutional Commitment

Some institutions have mandates to maintain disaster memory. Emergency management agencies, planning departments, and research institutions can serve this function.

But institutional commitment requires sustained resources and political support. When budgets are cut or political priorities shift, memory maintenance may be abandoned.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has gone through cycles of capability. Sometimes well-resourced and effective, sometimes neglected and dysfunctional, its capacity reflects shifting political priorities rather than constant vulnerability.

Breaking the Cycle

Is disaster amnesia inevitable? Can societies learn to remember?

Hardcoding Lessons

One approach is to embed disaster lessons in infrastructure and regulation that persists beyond memory.

Building codes that require earthquake resistance remain in effect even when no one remembers why they were adopted. Setback requirements that keep development away from flood zones persist even when the floods that motivated them are forgotten.

This approach works—until codes are weakened under political pressure. The challenge is making lessons resistant to political erosion.

Institutional Continuity

Organizations with long institutional memory can maintain disaster knowledge. Agencies with stable funding, professional staff, and institutional culture that values historical knowledge are more likely to remember.

The Dutch water boards, some of the oldest democratic institutions in Europe, maintain centuries of flood management knowledge. Their continuity ensures that lessons from medieval floods remain part of contemporary planning.

Creating such institutions—and protecting them from political interference—requires sustained commitment that democratic systems often lack.

Comparative Learning

Societies can learn from others’ disasters. Japan’s earthquake expertise can inform California’s preparation. New Orleans’ flood lessons can inform coastal cities worldwide.

But comparative learning requires mechanisms: international networks, professional exchanges, shared standards. These mechanisms exist but are often underfunded and underutilized.

Learning from others’ disasters avoids the need to experience catastrophe firsthand—but it requires intellectual and institutional infrastructure that isn’t automatic.

Making Memory Political

Ultimately, disaster memory persists when constituencies demand it.

If citizens mobilize around disaster preparedness, if they hold politicians accountable for prevention, if they resist the political economy of forgetting—memory can be maintained.

This requires ongoing political engagement. Not just after disasters, when attention is high, but during the long periods of normalcy when attention wanders.

Some communities achieve this. Communities that have experienced repeated disasters and developed strong disaster cultures maintain preparedness despite the forces of amnesia.

But this is the exception rather than the rule. Most communities forget—and pay the price when disaster returns.

The Politics of Memory

Disaster amnesia is not a cognitive failure. It’s a political outcome.

Memory serves interests. Forgetting serves different interests. The balance between them depends on political power.

Those who benefit from forgetting—developers, industries, politicians—are typically organized, resourced, and persistent. Those who benefit from remembering—vulnerable populations, future victims—are diffuse and often lack political voice.

This imbalance explains the persistence of amnesia. It’s not that societies can’t remember. It’s that the interests favoring forgetting are more powerful than those favoring memory.

Changing this requires changing the politics. It requires making disaster memory a political issue, creating constituencies that demand preparedness, holding officials accountable for prevention.

This is possible. Some societies do it better than others. But it requires ongoing political engagement that most societies, most of the time, don’t sustain.

The Cost of Forgetting

The cost of disaster amnesia is paid in lives.

Every disaster that repeats a previous disaster—that kills people who died before, in the same ways, for the same reasons—represents a failure of memory.

New Orleans in 2005 repeated Galveston in 1900. The 2023 Turkey earthquakes repeated 1999. COVID-19 repeated lessons from SARS that were learned and then forgotten.

These are not inevitable. They are political choices, made through action and inaction, through commission and omission.

The victims of repeated disasters are sacrificed to the political economy of forgetting. Their deaths are the price of convenience, of development, of political attention that wandered.

Understanding disaster amnesia as political doesn’t prevent disasters—but it does identify where intervention is possible. If forgetting is political, then remembering can be political too.

We don’t forget disasters because they’re too painful to remember. We forget because someone benefits from forgetting—and they have more power than those who would benefit from remembering.