The Fifth Risk(46)

Kim came to the University of Oklahoma in 2006 as a graduate student to study . . . well, she hadn’t been sure what she was going to study. She’d received her undergraduate degree in both meteorology and economics and, up to that point, focused on the economic impact of storms. What happens to the finances of a community hit by a tornado, for instance. The work interested her, but she also felt something was missing. “I just felt that classical economics wasn’t really hitting on the questions that meteorologists were asking,” she said.

Her frustration led her first into behavioral economics, which was no more than psychology made respectable to the sort of people who tended to think psychology was all bullshit. She set out to investigate a problem: How do people respond to risk? How might you influence that response, to their benefit? If you told someone that a tornado might be headed his way in a week, he’d give you a funny look and go about his business. If you pointed out to that same person the tornado bearing down on his house, he’d dive for cover. She wanted to figure out when and why complacency turned to alarm and when and why alarm turned into action.

In December 2010 she was finishing up her thesis when an adviser suggested that what she really needed to do was some fieldwork. Go out and interview reallive Americans who had responded to the news that their lives might be at risk. “They said,‘If anything happens in 2011, we want you to do a case study,’” said Kim. “Then Joplin happens.”

For complicated reasons, she set out to survey people not in Joplin but in Alabama and Mississippi. A few weeks before the catastrophe in Missouri, tornadoes had wreaked havoc in those states, despite excellent warnings from the National Weather Service. What became known as the 2011 Super Outbreak spawned 360 tornadoes that killed 324 and injured thousands more.

In its wake a pair of ideas sprang up and gained traction—both inside and outside the Weather Service. The first was that the twenty-minute warnings that had been issued had not given people enough time to escape. Powerful congressmen from tornado-prone states insisted that the National Weather Service needed to improve its ability to predict tornadoes to the point where they could warn people an hour in advance. And the National Weather Service had simply nodded and accepted the challenge. “Everyone in the Weather Service is so drawn to the mission of helping other people,” said Kim. “That’s what was so crushing about 2011. Oh, I may have just spent my entire career possibly doing nothing.”

But Kim wondered about the wisdom of their new ambition. “It’s hard to talk to dead people about the decisions they made,” she said. “It’s one of the challenges we have. But I was trying to ask what they would do if they’d had more time.” She interviewed survivors in Alabama and Mississippi and came away with a startling insight: time might be beside the point. It wasn’t that people who had apparently ignored the government’s alerts had been oblivious to them. “They were all aware of the warnings,” she said. “It isn’t that people wantonly disregard warnings. It’s that they think it won’t hit them.” The paper Kim subsequently coauthored pointed out that people associate “home” with “safety.” This feeling was reinforced each and every day that nothing horrible happened inside of it. People acquired a “false confidence that they would not be hit.” Some inner calculation led them to believe that, if it’s never happened here, it never will.

The people who had failed to seek shelter in the way that, say, a meteorologist thinks they should have done had one thing in common: they lived in homes that had never been struck by a tornado. They inhabited a region prone to tornadoes; they had lived through many tornado warnings; but right up until 2011 they themselves had been spared a direct hit. They offered Kim lots of explanations for their immunity to catastrophic risk. They claimed that tornadoes never crossed the river they lived on, for instance. Or that tornadoes always split as they approached their town. Or that tornadoes always followed the highway. Or that tornadoes never struck the old Indian burial grounds. People who lived on the west side of a big city felt more exposed than people on the east side: they believed buildings offered protection. A lot of people seemed to believe that hills did, too. “Where tornadoes go is totally random,” Kim said. “The steering winds are in the upper atmosphere. But people are not thinking of the forces of the atmosphere. They are thinking of their place on the ground.” Psychologists have long known that people see patterns where none exist. Londoners during the Blitz felt they’d deduced the targets of German bombers by where the bombs had fallen, when the bombs had been dropped randomly over the city. Americans routinely made the same mistake with the weather.

Soon we were driving west together, Kim Klockow and I. A few minutes after leaving the Storm Prediction Center, we passed from Norman into Moore, and from one wan row of shopping malls and car dealerships to another. Here was another curious example of man’s attitude toward the things that might kill him—and another illustration of Kim’s point. The people in Norman think that tornadoes don’t hit them; the people in Moore believe they are especially prone to being hit by tornadoes. Moore’s sense of doom dates back to May 3, 1999, when a tornado crossed the freeway and cut through the town. It was a mile wide and generated wind speeds of 302 miles per hour, the highest ever recorded on earth. It killed thirty-six people, including a woman who had sheltered exactly as experts had instructed, by lying in a bathtub and covering herself with a mattress. (A car crashed through her roof and landed on her.)