Hazards and the Private Sector

I know I’m sending off a blog storm today – I’ve managed to put together a lot of information on a wide range of issues coming off the Haiti earthquake, and am beginning to start sharing them out. One thing’s emerging, and that’s the fact that hazards affect different people differently, but also the fact that people themselves arrange themselves differently as well. General society, as managed by a central or local government, is one thing, but the private sector also represents an agglomeration of like-minded people with interests that can be wiped out in a disaster, and, like any individual, need to know how to mitigate these risks, though their interests may be spread over a far wider area and cover a larger amount of money than any individual’s.

This section is aimed primarily at the insurance sector, which takes our money and we pray they know what they’re doing. And they’ve looked at earthquakes and hurricanes, mostly, though there is a new thrust to begin looking at flooding. And it’s about time. Over the past 150 years, Jamaica’s been hit by over 2,000 significant-enough flood events (where at least a few homes and families have been affected), while, over the same period, we’ve had fewer than 100 hurricanes and tropical storms, and less than half a dozen earthquakes of any note. Sure, the devastation wrought by quakes and storms are more newsworthy, and collectively more costly, the frequency of flooding and its effects on lives, livestock and property cannot be ignored.

Insurance companies have elaborate packages for homes, cars, building contents, life insurance, etc, all possibly affected by hazard impacts. But real estate developers also need to know this as well. In this day and age, they can no longer plead ignorance of obvious facts, and dinosaur-ish methods of building (and approval processes) can no longer skip over inconvenient truths, in this era of internet-available digital data on hazards, modern field survey techniques, and systems analyses and modeling.

In a capitalist society, especially one where population continues to grow and demand resources, and where globalization requires ever-more-efficient means of delivering products and services to the global market and stay ahead of other countries in terms of our global competitiveness, we need to balance those needs with knowledge. An extreme position would be to say no to any development; any where is potentially hazard-prone. But this solves nothing about the growing population and its demand problems etc. And it also fails to recognize the associated growth in technology in providing for the population and its demands in a responsible manner, with proper analyses, models and building materials, as well as technologies’ abilities to improve efficiencies etc. But to ignore the hazard threat itself, as well as failing to use technology to assess and address this, is extreme folly.