The Fifth Risk(27)
And who wants to do that?
III
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S DATA
AS SHE WALKED the path that the tornado had torn through the American town, she was struck by how hard it would have been to imagine what she was now seeing. Two days earlier, on May 22, 2011, the wind had cleaved Joplin, Missouri, in two, leaving behind a lot of you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it stuff: a rubber hose run entirely through a tree trunk; a chair sideways, all four legs piercing a wall; a giant Walmart tractor trailer thrown two hundred yards onto the top of what had been the Pepsi building; a full-size SUV folded in half around a tree. The metal had been flayed from the car, and the tree was no longer a tree but a tree trunk, as all the branches had snapped and blown away. “I felt like some giant had taken an egg beater and run it through a town,” said Kathy Sullivan. “It was toothpicks.”
Then she realized that the egg beater metaphor was not exactly right, as the edges of the destruction were eerily undisturbed. What the tornado had narrowly missed was as perfectly preserved as what it had hit was perfectly eliminated. “It was like when you run your finger through the icing on top of a cake,” she said. “A clean line of total destruction.” Doctors in the local emergency rooms were seeing trauma they’d never seen. Body parts strewn on the ground outside the hospital. A small child, back stripped of flesh right down to the bone: they could count his vertebrae. People impaled by street signs. People with wounds that looked as if they were caused by automatic rifles—except that the objects deep inside them were not bullets. Seriously injured people had driven themselves to the hospital with dead loved ones in their cars and apologized to the hospital staff. They didn’t know what else to do with the bodies.
Tornado outbreaks in the middle of the United States that spring had killed more than five hundred people. In Joplin alone 158 people had died, and thousands had been injured, many critically. That was more than had been killed by a single tornado since the U.S. government had taken on the job of warning people about them. In and of itself this was shocking, but to Kathy Sullivan it was especially so. These people had been informed; the warnings from the National Weather Service, which would soon be reporting to her, had been even better this time than they usually were. The initial tornado watch had come four hours before the event—but then a tornado watch is different from a tornado warning. The average National Weather Service tornado warning comes thirteen minutes before a tornado strikes: Joplin’s sirens had sounded the warning seventeen minutes before the tornado touched down and nineteen minutes before it entered Joplin. But the citizens of Joplin had ignored it. “The majority of surveyed Joplin residents did not immediately go to shelter upon hearing the initial warning. . . ,” as the report Sullivan would soon oversee noted.
One day someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States government and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government’s attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them. The first successful tornado prediction was made on an air force base in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1948. The men who made it had been lucky: they wouldn’t be able to do it again. Knowing this, the government had taken the view that people were better off not being warned. The Weather Bureau, as it was then called, was banned from using the word “tornado.” It just frightened people, the bureau believed. But word got out: the government meteorologists had this mysterious new skill. And people demanded to hear what they had to say, even if what they had to say was of little value.
Since then, the government meteorologists had gotten better at their jobs. The billions of dollars they’d spent on satellites, radar, computing power, and better forecast models had led to, among other things, truly useful tornado warnings. And yet people didn’t seem to realize that the government’s weather information was more and more reliable—or even that it was their government giving it to them. It no longer shocked Kathy Sullivan to hear otherwise educated citizens say that they got their weather from the Weather Channel. Or some app on their phone. A United States congressman had asked her why the taxpayer needed to fund the National Weather Service when he could get his weather from AccuWeather. Where on earth did he think AccuWeather—or the apps or the Weather Channel— got their weather? Where was AccuWeather when winds of two hundred and something miles per hour were churning through an American town, killing people?
Clearly, citizens didn’t understand their government. But that had been true for some time. Now Kathy saw that the government didn’t really understand its citizens, either. Why had they not saved themselves? If anyone should know the answer to that question, it was Kathy herself—and she had no clue. In some curious way, the United States government had a better handle on the weather than on its own people. It had spent billions of dollars to collect data about the weather, and none about how people responded to it.
She could not help but admire the people of Joplin. Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it. Everybody who could was pitching in to help. The border of the devastated area looked like a tailgater at a college football game. The people who had been spared were cooking food for the people who had not. “No one asked questions,” said Kathy. “No one asked if your home had been destroyed. If you walked up and said you were hungry, you got food.”