ASU Research E-Magazine: Unnatural Disasters

“Disasters aren’t really natural,” says ASU sociologist Robert Bolin. “They’re shaped by all of the social practices and social activities that people engage in.”

Bolin studies the cultural, political, and economic aspects of natural disasters. His most recent work examines the effects of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. Bolin looked at “how particular categories of people are impacted by earthquakes and the various strategies they use to cope and recover.”

Not surprisingly, poor people are often hardest hit by disasters.

“If you’re poor, you don’t have a lot of options,” he says. “If you lose your house, and you have to move 40 miles away because there’s nothing else left in your community, obviously, that transforms your life.”

Housing is a critical issue in Southern California, Bolin says.

“There’s a fairly pronounced mismatch between what people need and what’s available. A lot of the housing is not suitable for people with large families, or not affordable. So when an earthquake takes out a section of housing, it causes problems.”

Although federal, state and non-governmental organizations all offered assistance to the California victims, Bolin found that certain groups of people could not take advantage of the help.

Government organizations do not offer assistance to illegal immigrants, for example. Other organizations, such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army, will help everyone, but many people were still afraid to come forward. Legal immigrants who do not speak English also had difficulty getting help.

“There are 80 languages spoken in the Los Angeles public schools. How does the federal government make information about assistance available with such a polyglot population?” asks Bolin.

He found that many non-English speakers went to community cultural organizations for help.

“Community-based organizations can offer some assistance, but they can’t give you mortgages on your home, things like that,” Bolin says.

The ASU sociologist found other, less obvious barriers to aid as well.

“There’s been a historical problem with federal disaster systems in that they insist on helping ‘normal’ households. In California, because of property values and rental prices, you have people living in converted garages who don’t have normal addresses,” Bolin explains.

“FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] requires a normal address. In the case of two families doubled up in an apartment, which isn’t at all unusual, FEMA recognizes only one of those families as having that address.”

While people search for housing after an earthquake, their abandoned apartments and neighborhoods often become a haven for crime.

“In Los Angeles itself, there was a phenomenon known as ‘ghost towns.’ Entire areas in the community were more or less abandoned,” Bolin says. “They become a magnet for crime. The key was to try and channel resources into those areas and get the apartments rebuilt quickly.”

The solution appeared relatively simple. But there was a big problem.

“Many landlords were not in a hurry to rebuild because they could barely make money off of those properties to begin with,” he adds.

Bolin claims that natural disasters are in many ways a social phenomenon. Magnitude alone does not determine how damaging an earthquake will be. For example, the Northridge earthquake would have been far more devastating if it hadn’t happened early in the morning on Martin Luther King Day.

“Nobody was commuting, the schools were shut down,” Bolin says. “One of the collapsed structures was a parking garage at Cal State Northridge. Imagine if that five-story garage had come down when it was filled with students. It was empty at the time of the quake.”

Earlier this year, the magnitude 7.1 earthquake near Twenty-nine Palms, Calif., was intense, but it was not a disaster at all, says Bolin.

“However, if you transplanted that quake beneath the center of downtown Los Angeles, we’d have something else to talk about,” he adds. “You need people to have disasters, otherwise, you just have earthquakes.”—Diane Boudreau