No, I’m not reporting bad news, just talking about the idea.
There’s an old adage or two related to bad news. First up is ‘no one likes bad news.’ Well, that’s obviously not entirely true. News organizations thrive on the stuff. But what the adage is getting at is not the people bearing bad news, it’s the people ‘receiving’ bad news. I’ll be getting to a bit more on that later, but for the most part I agree. No one really likes to hear bad news, especially when it impacts them directly.
The next adage about bad news is related to the messenger. Specifically it’s “Don’t shoot the messenger!” The idea is that in many cases the person who is messenger is simply a carrier of the news, and has nothing to do with it. There are some very important cultural reasons for paying attention to and publicly acknowledging the rule. At the same time the messenger needs to be careful not to appear to be taking joy at carrying and delivering the message.
When news carriers appear to be being rewarded for delivering bad news, they can be perceived as having an interest in the news as part of their job. The perception becomes that as a beneficiary of the bad news they are tainted and become suspects of generating bad news.
I’m going to go on the presumption that most of the bad news that is provided has little to do with the actual bad news.
Now back to the “no one likes to get bad news.” adage. If we exclude the thought of “bad news about someone else” the fact remains that it does depend on the possible responses to the news.
There are three basic types of bad news to work with then. There is the bad news where you can’t do anything about it yourself at the moment. Thousands dead from the earthquake and Tsunami in the Indian Ocean leaves you with the realization that there isn’t a whole lot that you can do about that situation. Oh you can donate to the Red Cross, or pray for the survivors, but once you’ve done that, you’re left with not all that much more that you can do. The scale is pretty much just too big for you to keep up with.
The second variety of bad news is stuff you can do something about. Perhaps you are in a position to take food to people in the aftermath of a natural disaster. You may not be able to help everyone affected but you’re going to do your part. While this is bad news, it is often news that people are OK with receiving. Some have been preparing for it for a while and are actually excited about finally getting to do Their part to help out.
Beyond that though is the worst of the bad news. Bad news that you could have done something about, or that you may even have been able to prevent in the first place.
Could the Corp of Engineers have prevented the disaster that has almost completely destroyed the 9th ward of the city of New Orleans. Perhaps. Oh sure if they had unlimited resources including people, materials, and time. But they didn’t. And while they are being taken to court over what they didn’t do, it should be remembered that they did do what had been asked, which was to provide protection form a storm as powerful as the one they last saw.
However in many cases people do feel a responsibility for something that they very well may have been able to prevent or contribute to the reduction of suffering that others are experiencing.
Really the worst of these situations are where someone knows what can be done to prevent a disaster from happening, and works for a significant part of their life to have that ounce of prevention be put in place, only to be rebuffed at every attempt. And when the final disaster does come in, are accused of not doing enough, and are handed punishment by the pound for that failing.
Perhaps it is justified to blame the Corps of Engineers for the failings of structures that lead to the flooding of New Orleans 9th ward. They are after all responsible for the structures that have been built to protect those people, their upkeep and improvement. But just as guilty are those who looked at the funding that was needed to pay for that upkeep and those improvements, who for years delayed or rejected the requests for those funds.
Part of that is fiscal management. And we do need to be responsible for where the funds we spend go. However equally a part of it is the recognition that while New Orleans has missed many major hurricanes over the decades, it has been hit, and will be hit again. Levies may not be the best protection for the population. It may be that the only viable protection for the area is to bring in enough fill that the ground will stay above sea level and river flood stage for the next hundred years. But we know that is not going to happen, there just isn’t enough money to fund that much earth moving. Note that that much soil moves past the city every year at no cost to the residents, simply because it is being carried by the Mississippi, but there would be costs involved in extracting the soil, and while now would be almost the perfect time to fill that area with the recovered soil as the majority of the property involved is essentially abandoned, I’m reasonably confident that such a decision will not be made. If only because someone will claim that the cost of rebuilding, again, one of the houses that has been rebuilt in the intervening years would be too much. Oh, and the cheapest way to perform that fill? redirect the Mississippi to flow through the area during flood stage, and when the waters recede bulldoze the fill that has settled to the edges. Within 10 years the entire area will have been re-filled except for a channel down the middle that will take less soil to fill than the levies along the Mississippi already.
When it comes down to it, ‘bad news’ falls into one of three categories: Unavoidable, get old and have accidents which will end lives; Avoidable, this is the ‘don’t do stupid stuff people’ option where many things belong; and Preventable, but we didn’t bother to set up or involve the prevention.
We’ve gone through several ‘preventable’ bits of bad news, even since the Katrina hurricane. While there are many that can be identified as design flaws, the vast majority of engineering disasters have more to do with failing to maintain the equipment, or failing to heed safety policies. There are a host of preventable pieces of bad news however that have nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with public policy. Some of those are things that get pointed back at engineers and engineering.
Failure to maintain what has been built is almost always a policy issue rather than a poor design or poor understanding of the structural issues. The I-35W bridge collapse was preventable. In fact safety reviews of the bridge had shown that the inspectors were concerned with the fitness of the structure. After the bridge collapsed there was a change in policy regarding the results of bridge inspections, and we have seen several bridges deemed unfit that had no difference between their inspections before, and after except the policy on how to treat those results.
Unfortunately all too many ‘preventable’ bits of bad news will continue to come in. Some may say that the financial collapse both recently and that is still to come, is preventable. Perhaps. Global warming may have been preventable. That I don’t know. Yes we are responsible for a huge increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 300 years, but there are other oddities about the way that the environment has behaved since the end of the last global ice age. And ‘the science’ which is not ‘in’ wasn’t ‘in’ 300 years ago when we started this age of development.
We will have more bad news. Of that I have little doubt. People have been known to suggest that humans don’t do anything that can ‘impact’ the weather of the whole world, or cause disasters on the scale of the Christmas day (or Boxing day depending on where you live) Tsunami, or Katrina.
However we are doing things on a scale that will have an impact. The earthquake in China a couple of years ago has recently been suggested to be triggered by the change in the shape of the crust due to the creation of a lake in the area. Compared to that lake, the lake created by the Three Gorges Dam will be small. Whether there is a crustal plate boundary or fault line that will be affected by that change in mass remains to be seen, but there are many unmapped fault lines that have been idle for long periods of time. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be activated.
Volcanologists run into this issue as well. How can you determine ahead of time what the results of an eruption will be. We can’t even predict earthquakes. We know that a large number of volcanoes on the west coast of the US are active, though they have not had an eruption within human experience in the area. The question then is how can one predict what the outcome of an eruption will be? The best you can do is look at the geologic record of events and try to figure out what the current sequence of events is suggesting will result. Unfortunately you don’t generally have any evidence for things like tremors leading up to eruptions, whether out gassing is an indicator that the eruption is imminent, or if it is, what imminent means for that volcano. Is imminent 2 months from now, or 200 years?
That doesn’t stop scientists from trying to identify what is important, and trying to make predictions based on their model of the world. The model will go through change though, and if you made a prediction based on your understanding of volcanoes 50 years ago, it’s probably a good idea to review and revise those results.
One of the outcomes of the flooding after Katrina is that we learned a significant amount about problems with the current design of the protections that had been in place in New Orleans. While there had been designs in place at the Corps of Engineers for improving the levies and protections for the city, which had outstanding requests for funding that had either been postponed or denied, how much of those updates would have been effective? We learned a substantial amount about what can make a levy fail during the 1993 flooding in the upper Mississippi and Missouri river systems, and some of that was undoubtedly being considered, but it appears that not all of the failures that occurred in New Orleans were of the same nature. It is likely that some of the failure points would not have had modifications done that would have helped.
At some level I suppose it is a good idea to summarize this. We know that bad news will continue. The important part is not the actual bad news, it is how we respond to it. We need to recognize that the reason it is considered bad news is that people care about the people or things that were affected by some event. This is actually a very good thing. We also need to recognize that just because things went wrong before, does not mean that knowing about them will prevent similar or worse events from happening in the future. But we do want to learn from them. And we want people to understand that just because some people seem to thrive on bad news from a ‘news’ perspective, should not detract from the fact that there are a lot of people who care and are affected at various levels, including some of those same people who are looking to the presentation of the news as their own life blood.
We do care, and that is one of many things that makes us human.
