Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental

Hazards

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The secret history of natural disaster

Ted Steinberg

To cite this article: Ted Steinberg (2001) The secret history of natural disaster, Global
Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 3:1, 31-35, DOI: 10.3763/ehaz.2001.0304

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 The secret history of natural disaster
Ted Steinberg*
Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106-7107, USA

Abstract

This paper explores the failure of historians to properly engage the study of natural hazards. It argues that by focusing mainly
on individual calamities, historians have overlooked the larger social and economic forces that have shaped the response to
natural disaster over the last century. Two important trends, real estate capitalism and the entry of the state into the
political economy of hazards after World War II, are singled out as crucial for understanding US society’s response to natural
disaster. As a result of these historical forces, risk became a commodity, with harmful environmental consequences.

Keywords: Natural hazards; History; Political economy

From the shop floor to the living room floor, from the
floor of Congress to the floor of the ocean, historians
have been everywhere. We have explored the North, the
South, the East, and the West. We have looked at homes
and gardens, offices and parks, forests and fields. We
have studied women and men, workers and farmers,
families and friends. We have examined rich people,
poor people, the middle-class, the up and up and the
down and out, old people, young people, blacks and
whites, Native Americans and Asians. We have looked
at virtually every single technological development there
has been, from the steamboat to the tractor to the
vibrator.
Historians have been everywhere and done everything
and yet, can you name a good historical treatment of
flash floods? How about a book on tornado disasters?
Or a history of building codes and earthquake risk?
Zoning and floodplain development? We have studies
that deal with virtually every single major piece of
legislation passed by Congress, from voting rights to
immigration, but virtually nothing on the National
Flood Insurance Program. There are lots of books on
finance but little, save for a few news and magazine
articles, on act of God bonds, or catastrophe deriva-
tives. Our profession has traveled far and wide, but
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-216-368-2380; fax: +1-216-368-
4681.
E-mail address: txs18@po.cwru.edu (T. Steinberg).
evidently not in the direction of natural hazards. What
accounts for the omission? Is it denial? Happenstance?
There have of course been history books about
natural disasters, some of them classics, like David
McCullough’s work on the 1889 Johnstown flood
(McCullough, 1968). And the 1927 Mississippi River
flood has been an especially hot topic (Daniel, 1977;
Barry, 1997). Fires have also been a source of major
historical interest. Stephen Pyne’s expansive treatment
of rural and wildlland fires is the classic work here
(Pyne, 1982). There have also been a number of books
about urban pyrotechnics, including two recent ones on
the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (Smith, 1995; Sawislak,
1995).
And then there is the Dust Bowl, also a much studied
disaster topic. 1979 was a banner year for dust with two
books, with identical titles no less, Dust Bowl, reaching
bookstores. Those inclined to blame drought and
technology for the monstrous black clouds should seek
out Paul Bonnifield’s study (Bonnifield, 1979). For
readers interested in a more far-reaching critique that
indicts the economic culture of capitalism, Donald
Worster’s book is a better bet (Worster, 1979).
Floods, fires, dust stormsFthis is by no means an
exhaustive list of what historians have done. But it
captures the general trend. What can we say about the
list by way of summation? First, generally speaking,
historians have opted to study calamities with obvious
human components. If you summon to mind a spectrum
of human responsibility for natural calamity with, say, a

Environmental Hazards 3 (2001) 31–35

doi:10.3763/ehaz.2001.0304 www.earthscan.co.uk/journals/ehaz
32 T. Steinberg / Environmental Hazards 3 (2001) 31–35
comet hit at one end, would it not be fair to locate
floods, fires, and dust storms at the opposite end?
Second, historians have tended to focus on individual
calamities. Geographer Kenneth Hewitt writes about
how the interpretation of calamity is often reduced to a
series of ‘‘temporally and spatially limited’’ events
(Hewitt, 1983, p. 10). The vast majority of the work
done by historians has fallen precisely into this
interpretive mode. We have many books that take a
single calamity, be it the 1927 flood or the 1930s dust
storms, as the analytical point of departure. A heat wave
like the one that burned Chicago in 1995 and killed
upwards of 400 people, and perhaps as many as 700,
somehow lacks the drama of a more easily pinned down
flood or fire, even if it proved more deadly.
Historians seem quite content to leave the study of
natural disaster to geographers and sociologists, who
have been infinitely more active in this area of research.
And yet, a profession that defines its mission, in part,
around the question of contingencyFof why some
things happen and some things do notFought to have
something of value to contribute to a discussion about
the ultimate unplanned event. Perhaps even more
important, if the general interpretive thrust of our
culture, with respect to natural hazards has centered on
denial, then history would seem like the perfect antidote.
What better way to treat such denial than to subject it to
analysis at the hands of people professionally trained to
combat the wish to forget.
There are two major historical trends that can help us
to organize our inquiry into natural hazards. The first
involves the rise of the modern capitalist economy and
the reorganization of space that has come with urban
and later suburban development. The second has to do
with the entry of the stateFthe federal governmentF
into the production and management of risk, especially
in the years after World War II. The two trends are of
course interrelated. And it is difficult to treat them
separately. But for clarity’s sake, it will be best to divide
them up and discuss them one at a time.
The first trendFsomething we can label for purposes
of shorthand as real estate capitalismFhas roots in the
distant past. But it exploded in importance in the late
nineteenth century, when urbanization boomed across
the nation, and then again in the period after World
War II, when suburban development transformed the
landscape into a huge dichromatic expanse of asphalt
and lawn. Capitalism is one of those terms that often
obscures as much as it reveals, but if properly defined, it
can be a useful concept. The standard Marxist definition
of the term, as a mode of production centered on wage
labor and the conflicts growing out of it, will not do for
my purposes. After all, the creation of an alienated
market in land was just as central to capital accumula-
tion as the market in labor. At least that is what the
environmental history of America, beginning as early as
the 1600s and spanning to the present, would suggest.
Instead of a doctrinaire definition of capitalism, why not
broaden its meaning and see it as it evolved historically,
beginning with a focus on the creation of private
property and a market in land (and such other
commodities as furs, timber, and so forth) and, by the
early nineteenth century, turning to wage labor as well.
Such an expansive view of capitalism allows us a
framework for taking space and ultimately natural
hazards into account, whereas the doctrinaire under-
standing leaves us stuck on the factory floor looking out
the window at the flood passing by.
Although a market in land existed as far back as the
seventeenth century, it was in the late nineteenth century
that real estate, in urban areas at least, really took off in
response to and in tandem with population growth. In
1869, only 9 cities had populations exceeding 100,000; in
1890, 28 urban areas had reached that mark. Between
1880 and 1910, for example, the population of earth-
quake-prone San Francisco grew 78 percent, from
234,000 to 417,000. Urban development in areas
susceptible to hurricanes also proceeded apace. The
population of New Orleans jumped, as did the number
of residents of such smaller cities as Galveston and
Corpus Christi, Texas, and Pensacola, Florida. These
demographic changes at least partly explain why the 50
years following 1880 were the deadliest in American
history.
The Gilded Age, as historians often refer to it, was
both a city building and city boosting age as well, with
urban areas seeking to out maneuver one another for
commercial dominance over a region. It was also a
period when real estate and business leaders in such
places as South Florida and California worked furiously
to deny the risk posed by geophysical extremes in an
attempt to fuel more urban growth. Even as late as 1935,
when a devastating hurricane struck the Florida Keys
Fthe most intense such storm ever to make landfall in
this country, killing 400 peopleFthe Miami Herald, in
these years a tool of the commercial class, complained
that, ‘‘these tempests are thrust onto the front pages
when they hit Florida, and thus they become Florida
hurricanes’’. But, as the paper went on, ‘‘the less said the
better’’. ‘‘People forget rather quickly’’, the paper
editorialized. ‘‘It is wiser to let them do so’’ (Steinberg,
2000, p. 63). A very strong relationship exists between
such attempts to play down the threat of natural disaster
and the lack of attention paid natural hazards in terms
of building codes and later zoning. In San Francisco,
where similar efforts to downplay calamity occurred in
the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire, the city’s
building code was briefly strengthened after the tragedy
and then almost immediately weakened.
Apart from the late nineteenth century, a similar
surge in development occurred in the aftermath of
World War II, especially along the nation’s east and
 T. Steinberg / Environmental Hazards 3 (2001) 31–35
west coasts. Consider that of the nearly 100 coastal
counties located in the hurricane-prone belt between
Texas and North Carolina, only 3 had a population of
250,000 or more in 1950. The number of such
population-rich counties rose three-fold to 9 in 1970;
and then doubled again to 18 in 1990. Meanwhile, the
total amount of insured property ballooned between
1980 and 1993 to some $3.1 trillion (Pielke, 1995).
As important as the numbers are, it is the way in
which suburban development unfolded and the risk it
manufactured that must concern us. Post-war devel-
opers, for instance, were so eager for building lots that
they considered building on marshland and hillsides
Fareas prone of course to natural hazards. The split-
level house, developed in the 1950s, proved especially
popular for those looking to build on steep grades.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, bulldozers made way
for more than 60,000 homes in the foothills and more
mountainous areas of Los Angeles County alone (Davis,
1998). As Los Angeles developers pressed ever harder
against the San Gabriel Mountains, residents paid the
price. In 1969 and 1978, the geologically active San
Gabriels, released a torrent of debrisFtons and tons of
mud and boulders, some the size of carsFthat turned
quiet life out in the suburbs into a nightmare.
These two bursts of energy in real estate capita-
lismFthe urban and suburban oneFled to the produc-
tion of risk on a grand scale. But of course developers
alone were not solely to blame for what happened. The
insurance industry, especially in the post-war years,
must also bear a great deal of responsibility. Along the
Atlantic coast, the period between 1969 and 1989 was a
time of relative quiescence hurricane-wise. There were
no major storms making landfall to speak of. Brokers
wrote policies like there was no tomorrow. But of course
there was a tomorrow, beginning with Hurricane Hugo
in 1989 and continuing with Andrew in 1992. In terms of
insured losses Andrew was roughly a $15-billion storm;
but it was very nearly, had the hurricane tracked just a
bit further north across a more prosperous part of South
Florida, a $65-billion disaster.
It is the prospect of such a huge financial loss that has
caused the insurance industry to lobby the federal
government to set up a disaster trust fund to help bail it
out when the Big One arrives. Others in the industry
have advocated turning more to the free market to help
them lay off risk. One idea is to allow speculators to
purchase risk by investing in insurance derivatives. The
Chicago Board of Trade has recently set up a calamity
index that is based on the amount paid out in insurance
claims divided by premiums. Brokers can write futures
and options contracts against the index. Essentially,
investors are rolling the dice on whether it is going to be
a good or a bad year for natural disasters. Insurance
derivatives are just another way of reshuffling the risk of
calamity. It represents yet another attempt to allow the
33
free market to define our society’s approach to natural
hazards, another effort to package local risks and move
them around like pieces on a chessboard. Moreover, it is
likely to promote the same kind of reckless development
that real estate capitalism has been generating for the
last century.
It is time now to turn to the other major historical
trend that should help inform our approach to natural
calamity: the federal government’s entry into the
business of risk production and management, primarily
in the period after World War II. The incredible increase
in land development in the suburbs that I’ve just
described was of course underwritten not just by the
insurance industry but to a large degree by the US
government itself.
The passage of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, for
example, provided $50 billion over 10 years for what
ranks as the most formidable public works project in the
nation’s history, a massive road-building program that
became the basis for nearly all the suburban sprawl that
has come to define the geography of modern America.
Not only did the federal government provide funds for
road building, it established an entire host of programs
and policies that fueled the building of homes in auto-
dependent suburbsFlow-interest mortgages, not to
mention the mortgage interest tax deduction (Jackson,
1985).
In 1950, America’s suburban population stood at 36
million. Twenty years later, the number had doubled to
74 million. The most important point to understand
about the rush to the suburbs is that it was largely
underwritten by the US government and its road- and
house-building programs. The price of suburban life
has been amortized to taxpayers across the nation, with
the benefits, such as they are, going only to those
affluent enough to buy cars and to live near the beach or
on the sides of mountains.
On the one hand, the federal government has under-
written and thus helped to produce risk. On the other, it
has tried in the post-war years to manage that risk. In
1950, Congress passed legislation allowing the president
to make disaster declarations to aid state and local
governments in repairing public facilities. Prior to that
time, a special legislative enactment was required to
provide such relief. But the key changes occurred in
the late 1960s. In 1969, the US government for the
first time extended relief aid to private individuals
themselves through loans, opening up the floodgates to
government relief. The year before, Congress passed the
National Flood Insurance Program, what has evolved
into yet another way of underwriting risky land ventures
(May, 1985).
In effect, the US government has taken a set of acute
local risks and spread them out for people all across the
nation to bear. The result has been predictable: poor or
reckless development in hurricane-, flood-, and earth-
34 T. Steinberg / Environmental Hazards 3 (2001) 31–35
quake-prone locales, courtesy of the federal govern-
ment’s largesse. Perhaps the only positive dimension to
this federalized system of disaster response was its role
in counteracting somewhat the earlier tendency to deny
calamity. To receive federal relief aid, states had to
admit that a disaster had in fact taken place. In other
words, there was an incentive to admit destruction and
even to exaggerate it in order to pry as much money as
possible out of the government. Crude attempts to
downplay calamity, the stock in trade of city boosters
early in the twentieth century, fell by the wayside.
But overall, the federalization of natural disaster risk
did more harm than good. Even when the federal
government has sought to contain risk, it has, in the end,
amounted to little more than a subsidy for more suspect
development. Consider the National Flood Insurance
Program. When enacted in 1968 the idea was to
subsidize those living in flood-prone locales and in
return the federal government would require these
communities to pass appropriate hazard zoning laws
and land-use regulations to help mitigate the impact of
future calamities. There was some real logic to the plan
as initially enacted. The problem is that the federal
government has lacked the political will to enforce the
spirit of the act. The program has been weakened
considerably over the last 30 years. By 1994, the Clinton
administration simply required that ‘‘positive attitudes’’
with respect to floodplain management be ‘‘encouraged’’
(Steinberg, 2000, p. 111). What the federal government
has perpetuated here on the American people is the
equivalent of passing out the keys to the treasury.
Real estate capitalism working in tandem, especially
in the post-war period, with federal programs designed
to underwrite development, provide the historical
underpinnings to the current natural disaster problem.
Acute local risk has been severed from spaceFpackaged
up and parceled out to taxpayers all across the country
to bear, or to investors willing to assume its burden. The
risk of natural disaster, in other words, has been
thoroughly commodified, obscuring moral responsibility
and undermining our culture’s ability to deal with the
problem.
Armed with this historical framework for under-
standing natural calamity, what should we set off to do?
If the commodification of risk and its history gives us a
general road map for discussing natural hazards, in
what direction should we set off ? How should we invest
our energies, research-wise? What topics should we
explore?
Historians might, for example, consider teaming up
with our geographer colleagues and let space and place
play a larger role in our thinking about this topic. One
idea would be to examine the history of real estate
development in coastal counties, say from Texas to
North Carolina. Which counties boomed and why?
What does the zoning history look like? How do the
individual counties stack up with respect to this issue?
What about building codes? What standards are
promulgated and why? Whose interests are served in
these codesFbuilders, developers, insurers, home-
owners? Are they properly enforced? South Florida
has what is reputed to be one of the toughest building
codes in the nation; but it went largely unenforced
during the 1980s building boom, explaining why
Hurricane Andrew was as destructive as it was. The list
of questions is long: What role has the insurance
industry and the federal government played in develop-
ment along the Atlantic coast? What about the
evolution of takings law and the question of private
property in land? Has the trend, especially over the last
decade, toward allowing landowners more latitude in
how they develop their land affected the coastal region’s
risk profile?
But alas, if the drama of a single event, as opposed to
a mundane stretch of landscape, proves irresistible in the
end, here is a suggestion. Instead of simply glorifying the
massive destruction or wallowing in the macabre, why
not take the trend toward the popularization of calamity
more seriously and make it the topic of study. My hunch
is that natural disasters first became a form of mass
entertainment in the late nineteenth century. This is
when circuses with their freak shows began to resonate
among some segments of the American public and freak
natural acts fit in well with this trend. Natural disaster
reenactments at such places as Coney Island flourished.
Americans began experiencing ‘‘natural disasters’’ dur-
ing their leisure time in controlled amusement park
settings. Why this trend toward the vicarious experience
of disaster? There were plenty of real, live calamities of
course taking place during this period, from the 1886
Charleston earthquake to the 1900 Galveston flood to
the notorious 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Hadn’t Americans had enough? Or was the root cause of
the public’s fascination the fact that city leaders in
disaster-stricken cities called on citizens to control
their emotions and stay calm in the wake of calamity?
Did people feel the need for these contrived disaster
events because they were now being discouraged
from expressing their fears and emotions in public?
(Steinberg, 2000)
How did the popularization of calamity evolve from
its roots in the late nineteenth century? What purpose do
such disaster movies as Earthquake serve in our culture?
Why the news media’s incredible fascination with
disaster? How have they interpreted and portrayed
natural disasters and what impact, if any, has media
coverage had on attempts, or the lack thereof, to push
through tougher, more responsible building and zoning
rules? It seems to matter a great deal if the news media
cites, as they did after Hurricane Hugo, for example,
wildly inflated wind speed figures. Doing so makes such
an event seem like a freak, overwhelming occurrence
 T. Steinberg / Environmental Hazards 3 (2001) 31–35
totally beyond the control of human beings and would
seem to support those who argue against tougher
regulations. Is there a relationship between the attempt
to puff up nature’s fury and the failure to pass more
stringent laws? Rather than trivialize natural disaster
further in our research and writing, why not take its
popularization seriously, as an important historical
trend that may have equally significant policy conse-
quences for how our culture deals with the problem?
There is no doubt in my mind that, employed
properly, history has an important part to play in
national and international debates over policy. The
discipline’s near total absence from the Decade for
Natural Disaster Reduction initiative is not the least bit
surprising. As historians, we have neglected this area of
study. Back in 1988, a historian wrote an essay in the
American Historical Association’s newsletter titled ‘‘A
Neglected Field: The History of Natural Disasters’’
(Burnham, 1988). That advice was largely ignored, even
by the author of the article himself, as best I can tell. If
political leaders and others overlook or fail to consult us
with respect to disaster reduction policies, it is the
profession’s own fault.
And yet, when it comes to informing national debates
over the response to natural hazards, history can play an
important and vital role. History has at least two major
advantages that can help in this regard. First, it can
reveal alternatives to our present approach to natural
hazards. Historians can draw our attention to where
things went wrong. Imagine if the spirit, for instance, of
the National Flood Insurance Program had actually
been carried out on the ground, instead of degenerating
into a neat little handbook on how to have a natural
disaster with the greatest of ease. Exploring the history
of a topic as simple as building codes can show us what
the alternatives are to planned mass destruction.
Second, history can be used to counteract denial and
apathy and, most important, the naturalization of
natural hazards by bringing to light the hidden costs
and human dimension of the problem. Natural disasters
are not inevitable, predestined events and histor-
iansFthe supposed experts in contingencyFcan help
us see why this is so. A historical approach has the
35
potential to show us the way out of the present political
economy of risk. If we explore the secret history of
natural disaster, pull back the layers of obfuscation,
deposited there by successive generations of city
boosters and popularizers, we might just see, to quote
the philosopher Stanley Cavell, that these ‘‘melancholy
accidents’’, as he put it, are in fact, ‘‘the inevitabilities of
our projects’’ (Cavell, 1981, p. 82).
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