Weighing Your Risks of Becoming a Terror Victim

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Weighing Your Risks of Becoming a Terror Victim

March 23, 2003
By JOHN TIERNEY 




 

WASHINGTON - On Aug. 24, 1940, as German planes were
attacking London, Edward R. Murrow stood in Trafalgar
Square with a microphone recording the sounds of the blitz.
His listeners heard a siren wailing and antiaircraft guns
firing, but the broadcast was remarkable for what was not
heard. There was no sound of panicked Londoners running for
cover. 

"People are walking along very quietly," Murrow reported.
"We're just at the entrance of an air raid shelter here,
and I must move the cable over just a bit, so people can
walk in." 

If Murrow had been reporting during the equivalent of our
siren last week - the raising of the terrorist threat level
from yellow to orange - he might have found some Americans
calmly prepared to deal with an attack. But the main sounds
probably would have been people complaining about the
Homeland Security Department, despairing at unspeakable
catastrophes or joking about duct tape. So far on the home
front, this is not our finest hour.

President Bush did not help morale by warning in his speech
Monday night that terrorists could kill "hundreds of
thousands of innocent people in our country" and wreak
"destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth."
Terrorists might well wreak horror in America, but of all
the things they could do, how likely is an unprecedented
catastrophe on the scale envisioned by Mr. Bush?

To scholars who study risk, the president was guilty of the
same sin committed by opponents of nuclear power who warn
of tens of thousands of deaths from an accident. Dwelling
on worst-case scenarios can be useful politically when
you're trying to justify a war or shut down a power plant,
but it distracts you from preparing for the problems you're
most liable to face.

"Responsible risk assessors avoid worst-case scenarios
because they create strong gut feelings that make the
likelihood of the event seem way out of proportion," said
Paul Slovic, the president of Decision Research, a
nonprofit institution in Eugene, Ore. "You can imagine all
kinds of scenarios, like an unseen meteorite hitting Earth
and destroying civilization before the war in Iraq is over,
but the key in risk is probability."

The probability of a terrorist attack occurring in the
United States may be high, but the risk to any one person
seems relatively low. Barry Glassner, the author of "The
Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong
Things," notes that even in 2001, that singularly bad year,
the worldwide death toll from terrorism was under 4,000,
less than a tenth of the death toll from car accidents in
the United States alone.

"These constant warnings about terrorism may be doing more
harm than good," said Dr. Glassner, a professor of
sociology at the University of Southern California. "They
increase anxiety, which makes people susceptible to various
accidents and a whole range of health problems." He
recommends that Americans concentrate on reducing other
risks - like getting bicycle helmets for the children who
don't have them - before shopping for antiterrorism kits.

Some experts, though, say that hearing warnings and taking
personal precautions against terrorism can be useful,
especially for the many Americans - at least a third of
respondents in most polls - who worry that someone in their
family will be hurt by terrorism.

"Giving people something to do makes them feel less
helpless," said David Ropeik, director of risk
communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. "The
more control we feel, the less we fear. The citizen
preparedness campaign is a valuable new front in the war on
terrorism, because they're finally acknowledging that
reducing fear is part of the battle."

The public, however, has hardly welcomed the government's
campaign. The chief responses have been scorn and jokes, in
part because of the way the campaign was introduced last
month. The first suggestion most Americans heard was to buy
duct tape, which sounded silly to the public and dubious to
some experts. Veterans of disaster planning faulted some
advice for being incomplete or irrelevant.

Still, much of the advice was sensible enough - flashlights
and stockpiles of food and water could be useful for
emergencies other than a terrorist attack. Why the disdain?


Those people who responded with contempt did so because of
an "infantile yearning to be allowed to remain passive
while the government takes care of us," said Peter Sandman,
a risk communication consultant based in Princeton, N.J. We
want Tom Ridge to make the problem go away instead of
telling us to prepare, he explained, and it's not because
we're afraid. 

"The most powerful and most lasting response to 9/11 has
been not fear but misery," Dr. Sandman said. "Although
people don't expect to die in a terrorist attack, they do
expect to have to live through a series of attacks, to
watch them on CNN and explain them to their children. That
expectation - which is accurate, not exaggerated - makes us
miserable." 

Dr. Sandman's prescription is what he calls the
"routinization of terror," the approach taken by Londoners
in 1940 and Israelis today. Treat terrorism not as an
unthinkable horror but as an occasional event you prepare
for and live with, like a hurricane or an earthquake. Ivo
H. Daalder, a terrorism expert at the Brookings
Institution, offers similar advice to the public, and to
politicians and journalists prone to sensationalizing risk.


"Our goal should be to make Americans prepare for terrorism
without paralyzing them with fear," he said. "As it is,
we've made terrorism into something awful that has the
potential to paralyze the nation. Can you imagine the
national panic that would have ensued if that recent fire
at the Rhode Island nightclub had been caused by a
terrorist bomb? We can't give terrorists that much power
over us."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/weekinreview/23TIER.html?ex=1049423907&ei=
1&en=08db4da7716f3795



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