You Can't Fight City Hall

'You can't fight City Hall'
6.6.08
Superwinds: Plan Ahead Now, Institute of Physics, London

‘You can’t fight City Hall’ as the saying goes. But there’s a time when you have to even if the odds are stacked against you. And that’s when you believe people’s lives could be at risk if you don’t. And the advent of superwinds is just one of those occasions.

Preventing disaster is obviously a complex challenge at the best of times. It involves reducing exposure—it involves improving communication of the risks—it involves better education about those risks to the community. But more than anything, it involves potential threats that might lead to disaster being recognised—being evaluated—and being understood. And this is one reason we have organised this conference today.

Apparently there are 3000 or so active or potentially active volcanoes in the world but only a few are monitored for obviously reasons. You can’t cover everything! But at the GWA we believe the risk of London being hit by an extra-tropic cyclone or tornado is now great enough for it be monitored more closely and for certain other steps to be taken. And I suppose this is where City Hall comes in!

And this point I would like to thank some of the Emergency Planning Officers who are here today Andrew Meek from Haringey, Kofi Danso from Hounslow, David Kerry from Kensington and Chelsea, Laura Watson from Hackney, Paul Waxman from Southwark Rowena Proctor from Emergency Planning at the London Fire Brigade for taking the time to join in with his event.

At the Global Warming Alliance we believe that there should be improved communication about what to do in such an occurrence of an extra tropic cyclone for the public. I conducted a survey recently and as you would expect the word cyclone was barely related to by people in the street. Interestingly enough, most members of the public I spoke with had noticed changing conditions and many expressed concern that they wouldn’t have a clue what to do if they were in the path of such a storm. They were all reliant on news from the government, the television, the web. It has become a ‘look it up on the net’ society. If it’s not there, it’s not going to happen, according to them.

Improving communication doesn’t just save lives, it also projects an incalculable feeling of goodwill and a range of other positive emotions just as the freezing of communication in disasters does directly the opposite. We could take the international shock over the poor handling of Hurricane Katrina by the American authorities as one example of ‘let down’ but also the way in which China – which was receiving appalling press just a couple of months ago when the Olympic torch was being carried around streets just nearby to here—underwent a complete image transformation over their recent tragedy. They came across as sensitive, caring. I think almost overnight a lot of people had a very different view of Chinese people—looked at them in a different way as a result of how their authorities reacted to disaster. With climate change being such an interdependent problem nations are viewing one another in this way more so then at any other time.

Communication of those risks pays off. I recall some years ago having a bizarre conversation on whether or not education was a waste of time when footballers were making so much more money than doctors—pay attention in class. In Maikhao beach in northern Phuket 10 year old Tilly Smith had studied tsunami in geography and recognised the warning signs of the receding ocean. She and her parents warned others on the beach, which was evacuated safely. John Chroston, a biology teacher from Scotland, also recognised these signs at Kamala Bay north of Phuket, taking a busload of holidaymakers and locals to safety on higher ground. Not that it’s always the answer. Our own headteacher who taught both our children perished that day along with her whole family. She was on the beach at Kaho Lak at the time.

So we know that education does play an important role in saving lives and because of what we’ve been discussing today we—at the Global Warming Alliance for example—would like to see a return to labelling and projecting the isobar readings on BBC weather forecasts to acquaint people with what they mean in terms of weather. People are interested in what is affecting them and at present the potentially high risk situations pass completely over most peoples heads and there’s no way they can work it out for themselves.

We accept sometimes Government warnings aren’t enough. A week before Nargis the Burmese Government apparently received warning of the cyclone and its location and still failed to act for a myriad of reasons. Of course there is the classic story of the inconvenient voice: The Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004—Kerry Sieh, the geologist who was so concerned at the lack of government education about the potential risk from a quake that he paid for the printing and distribution of leaflets to warn threatened communities, but to little avail. There is no doubt that lives would have been saved had communications been better in that case. Not just after the event. And then that’s another matter. In the Asian Tsunami for example the Swedish Government were badly criticised over their insensitive handling of the Asian Tsunami as many ministers were on Christmas holidays at the time – Sweden lost more of its nationals than any other European country in that particular disaster.

However, I would like to end on a positive note—always nice to do, and particularly on a Friday afternoon. The speakers today have talked about the danger of strong winds today. But wind is not just a horror story for this country. In the past seven years wind harvesting has been the fasting growing sector of the sustainable energy industry. I spoke with Brian Hurley last week—the founding scientist of AirTricity—one of the business success stories of Ireland—there is a representative here today from Airtricity who I know will be happy to explain the marvels of wind and how important it is to our future. As Peter Madigan of the British Wind Energy Association tells me that ‘Germany looks jealousy on our wind’ and my younger daughter came home from school the other day and announced proudly that she had been taught we are now the windiest country on earth. On Brian’s behalf I would like to add that wind turbines—which stop operating in high winds—and which have had their share of bad press recently. They are on average very safe and those that have collapsed in high gusts are a very small percentage of the total turbines in action across the world. Of course the wind industry is on the whole doing a great job in sustainable energy production to help counter the problems of climate change due to anthropogenic global warming.