WILLIAM RAU

There were 20 lifeboats on the Titanic, which would hold about half of the ship’s occupants. Although designed to carry 64 lifeboats, that number was cut in half and then cut again because the White Star Line considered the Titanic “almost” unsinkable and wanted to increase deck space for passengers. Poor performance of lifeboats in rough seas after past ship sinkings prejudiced ship lines against them. So they made ships as unsinkable as possible and ignored improving lifeboats.

Bias against lifeboats carried over to dilatory training in their use. Only one slapdash training exercise for the crew was conducted before the Titanic set sail, crew members did not know their lifeboat stations, and there were no drills with passengers. The only drill — scheduled the very day the ship hit an iceberg — was cancelled because the captain chose to officiate over Sunday service.

Thus, lifeboat launches were absurdly slow and bungled. One hour passed before the first lifeboat, with 28 rather than 65 people onboard, was lowered into the frigid Atlantic waters. In the end, boats were filled to only 60% of capacity with 470 rescuable people perishing. That drove total fatalities to 1,500 (Wiki 2023). Forty lifeboats and proper training would have cut the death count to nil.

The Titanic can serve as a metaphor for the growing risks of large-scale, climate-related disasters. Wealthy nations have already had one: the 70,000 deaths caused by Europe’s brutal 2003 heatwave (Robine 2008). Even after such dramatic shocks, we still fail to employ forward-looking disaster planning. Therefore more mass casualty events lie ahead with America overdue for the big one. Heatwaves in particular require thorough planning because of their record as mass killers. Yet no level of Illinois government takes them seriously.

Even serious planning will fail if we limit ourselves to standard command-and-control disaster protocols. The reason is that this approach lacks the manpower, flexibility, and alacrity to cope with community-wide disasters requiring 15-minute response times. However, we can prevent emergency management agencies from becoming overwhelmed.

In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, San Fransico firefighters were initially unable to put out fires because water mains were ruptured. What saved the day were hundreds of volunteers who helped carry hoses from a fireboat at the waterfront which then pumped seawater to besieged firefighters. Elsewhere factory workers spontaneously employed heavy equipment to rescue people buried in rubble. Meanwhile throughout the city, citizens directed traffic at intersections without traffic lights while others barbecued thawing food to feed the hungry. Citizen volunteers helped keep the Loma Prieta death count to about 60 people.

During post-quake review, the fire department found that it would be completely overwhelmed by bigger earthquakes. Why? Because fires whipped up by large quakes would require 270 fire engines and — shades of the Titanic — the city had only 41. At the same time Loma Prieta showed that most people could be rescued by volunteers with some training. As a result, they set up Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams, or NERTs, and trained 17,000 San Franciscans. As Rebecca Solnit (2020: 310) notes, “the NERT program trusts citizens and distributes power to the thousands who have been trained in basic rescue, firefighting, and fire-aid techniques and given safety vests, hardhats, and badges.”

Illinois needs NERTs if we are to cope effectively with heatwaves which, by the 2030s, will become annual summer events. Next month I will turn to that topic.

References

Robine, Jean-Marie, et. al. 2008. Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003. Comptes Rendus Biologies 331(2); Link to Science Direct

Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York Penguin.

Wiki. 2024 (Feb 15). Lifeboats of the Titanic. Wikipedia; Click here