Abstract
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
As Frost’s poetic metaphor reminds us, catastrophes can come from blistering heat or extreme cold. A catastrophic ice storm in January 1998 that devastated Ontario and Quebec provinces (including the cities of Ottawa and Montreal) and parts of New Brunswick in Canada and the upper northeast of the United States, especially Maine, provides the cold in Frost’s poem. The storm is documented with great detail in Leadership in Disaster: Learning for a Future with Global Climate Change. The heat was provided by Erik Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a gripping account of that city’s 1995 heat wave where due to week-long, record temperatures of over 100° (hitting up to 106° with a heat index over 120°) and record humidity, rail lines folded, there were rolling blackouts, some streets buckled, and over 700 people died. Klinenberg’s sociologically rich interpretation of the tragedy became a near-instant classic. Raymond Murphy’s detailed account of the great northeastern ice storm has the potential of achieving similar acclaim.
The ice storm was an extremely rare event, something that occurs so infrequently that it makes little sense to plan for it beforehand. The winter of 1997–98 was unusually mild in northeastern North America, a vast area accustomed to harsh winters and large quantities of precipitation, especially snow. On Monday January 5, freezing rain began to fall and continued to fall intermittently for five days. It was caused by the warm air currents of an ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) that collided with a “Siberian Express,” a mass of cold, dry air familiar to the region. The moist air warmed by El Niño produced rain that turned to ice when it descended through the cold air mass of the Express—a definitive “perfect storm.”
The weight of the ice on power lines and trees virtually crippled the electrical grid, not only causing misery and deaths (30 in Canada and 17 in the United States), but also serving as a stark reminder—which author Murphy develops effectively and underscores throughout—of the increased vulnerability of modern societies to complex technologies. At the height of the disaster many homes were without electricity, sometimes for weeks: 3.5 million residents of Quebec (one-half the population), 700,000 in Ontario, and 300,000 in New England, and the city of Montreal was nearly cut off completely. A modern electrical grid connects, and makes vulnerable, a wide swath of unrelated human activities: from the electricity farmers need to milk cows, pump water, and remove manure to ATM machines that cannot provide the cash needed for necessities to houses with plummeting temperatures but warming refrigerators (and rotting food) to silent traffic signals to the shutdown of water pumping stations and sewage treatment facilities, to the embalming of dead people to fires due to power surges when electricity is restored.
Leadership in Disaster is divided into four sections: the first on sociological theory and metatheoretical issues, the second on the actual events and impacts of the disaster (covered in painstaking detail), the third on the activities of the leaders of the various governments dealing with the disaster, and a final chapter that reflects on how to learn and better prepare for future disasters—especially in light of the added uncertainties imposed by global climate change. It is a tribute to Murphy that he could, as a resident of Ottawa, redefine his experience with this disaster from victim to participant-observer of a rare research opportunity.
It is in this division that deep troubles begin. The first section, combining a highly selective review of the risk literature with the development of Murphy’s metatheoretical position on the topic, seems divorced from the rest of the book. There is little evidence of a clear integration of theory with the detailed ethnographic history and “thick” description that follows—each seems to be a stand-alone document. Furthermore, the prose is asymmetrical—it vacillates from engaging to soporific, from insightful to banal, and from parsimonious to tedious redundancy (a possibility that Murphy himself recognizes).
The author’s metatheoretical position emphasizes the existence of “nature,” as a set of real biophysical forces independent of social constructions and discourse about it, while recognizing its continuous socialization by human actions. At the same time he recognizes that our understanding of nature is inexorably and tautologically a social construction. Murphy seeks to distinguish clearly the risks that are real (to be found in the material world) from those that are fictional (residing in perception and discourse alone). He uses the metaphor of dance “to comprehend the interactions between movements in the material world of nature and the social practices of humans.” In an apparent effort to up the tempo of his dance, Murphy refers to the dynamics of nature as “nature’s constructions”—also indicating an inability to escape completely the juggernaut of constructivism that dominates the sociology of risk. The term may provide a clever symmetry between the natural and the social, but the reasoning is deeply flawed. For one thing, the word “construction” usually means that a person actively creates or builds something; there is agency and intentionality here. One needs to make a case for nature as an agent with intention, not simply assume it. For another, a variety of other words—natural forces, dynamics, disturbances, hazards—all of which are used by Murphy are perfectly adequate to his task. His practice of choosing a problematic neologism, not fatal in itself, looms larger when repeated unreflectively and when added to other flaws.
Leadership in Disaster’s potential for attracting the acclaim accorded Heat Wave as well as its classic status is unrealized. While disaster experts in the field may find the book germinal and especially apt for graduate courses, its opaque contribution to advancing our understanding of this important topic combined with the often-tedious prose will unlikely attract the larger audience that is requisite to classic status. I hope its sales prove me wrong.